Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Going beyond the easier use case of mocking attributes and databags, we sometimes want to fake some data about the system itself.

The more complex your cookbooks, the bigger the need to supply some external information to your test machines. Passing specific attributes, values of databags or secrets for testing become necessary. We will go through these use cases and show how to mock the data in this post.

CDK is great for serverless architectures. But the deploy times even for small lambda functions is to slow. Here is a little trick which can speed up things a lot. A small caveat: It is cheating.

Generation of Infrastructure-as-Code is fun. To be the real DevOps hero, you should build a complete CI-CD pipeline. But this is a piece of work. And if you want to deploy to multiple accounts, it gets tricky. With the new CDK, builtin pipeline Construct, it’s easy - if you solve a few problems. Here is a complete walk-through.

Pure CloudFormation coding only with vi can be hard work. But since CloudFormation still is the lingua franca of AWS infrastructure as code, the ecosystem keeps evolving. Even if you only use it indirectly, there are some tools to spice up your development. Hot diagrams, more aroma with compliance checks or bittersweet automated testing. Ready to taste it? Here we go.

It is surprising how many resources on the Internet are carrying on outdated or deprecated information - the Chef ecosystem is no exception to this. While outdated style in Ruby files has been detected via cookstyle for a while, Test Kitchen files still have no sanity checks yet. Let’s see what changed in this short post.

AWS Setup: Secure Identity Foundation with Terraform When it comes to access management in AWS, often I see a basic setup, with Users in IAM, as described here. Clearly, most people focus on building actual running applications, at first. After the first running POCs, the next migrations are on the road map; your architecture evolves, but the initial IAM setup stays. So it’s better to have a super secure set-up right from the beginning.

The State of Target Mode in 2020 After my blog series on the agentless use of Chef dubbed “Target Mode” between August and October 2019, it is time to review what happened since. Updated 14th October 2020