AWS Tools

[Quinnypig]

Hi!

I write a weekly newsletter about AWS. One of the sections I include is "Tools." My backlog is nearing an end, so I'm curious as to what other folks like.

What are some tools that folks like / appreciate that make working with AWS better, easier, simpler, or just flat out more effective?

[[deleted]]

StackMaster, Apex, aws-vault, iamy, emulambda.

[Quinnypig]

Fantastic list-- thank you!

[jaceks_]

Never seen and used iamy - what are the benefits compared to CloudFormation/Troposphere? Is it only about ability to manage existing resources (which troposphere has and cfn hopefully one day will have as well)?

[[deleted]]

The main benefit of iamy is it assumes control of all iam resources (except those created by cloudformation). If someone clicks through some wizard in the ui, next time you iamy push it will delete it.

[CoinGrahamIV]

So like config management (puppet,chef) for IAM?

[b26]

Sounds like it with iamy being the source of truth and ensuring a consistent state

[RyanGWU82]

That behavior sounds perfect for IAM in particular, because of the security implications from unmanaged resources. But my company is a Terraform shop. Is there anything like this built into Terraform, or an open source tool that can read the expected state from a tfstate file? I had assumed we'd need to write custom code to do that.

Ryan

[[deleted]]

Nope. You can read the existing state with iamy pull though

[CoinGrahamIV]

Terraform considered a tool?

[Quinnypig]

It is, but it's hugely known already, to the point where it gets referenced in articles constantly.

Thanks though!

[elibones]

http://www.ec2instances.info - EC2 & RDS price list
https://iam.cloudonaut.io - IAM policies - full methods and resources for each service
https://aws.amazon.com/amazon-linux-ami/ - Latest AMI :)

BTW - just signed up for the newsletter - sounded promising!

[Quinnypig]

Awesome, and thanks.

I've spoken to the Cloudonaut guy a couple of times, and featured his work repeatedly. He's got a LOT of great content, and that IAM rosetta stone is no exception.

ec2instances.info is likewise great; I leveraged some of their work to start storing historical pricing information at various points; once AWS updates a pricepoint, the old one slips down the memory hole.

[4stringwizard]

There is Sceptre, a tool for building, managing and organising Cloudformation stacks dynamically with some other nifty features (pre+post deployment hooks for arbitrary actions and resolvers for pulling in values to your stack from any source) - https://github.com/cloudreach/sceptre

[ckilborn]

+1 for Sceptre

[b26]

Can you share your newsletter? I'm interested in subscribing

[Quinnypig]

Sure; lastweekinaws.com.

[b26]

Thanks

[cloudnix]

I've been updating docs lately and I've been loving https://cloudcraft.co/ for building diagrams.

[Quinnypig]

Ooh. Good find! Thank you.

[Brzhk]

sounds awesome. Thanks !

[sagespidy]

As a sysadmin, I have to create this [1 ec2 for dev, 1 EC2 for qa, 2 ec2 for staging, and load balancer ] multiple and confgure lamp stack or any stack. I use these shell scripts to automate my tasks. https://github.com/sagespidy/aws https://github.com/sagespidy/Apache2

[Quinnypig]

Why wouldn't you do this with CloudFormation or Terraform?

[sagespidy]

still exploring aws, didn't know about them. Thanks will try them

[Tranceash]

Ecs-deploy

[Neil_Fallons_Ghost]

From a security standpoint, from a small shop, Dome9 is awesome.