Hello all!
Welcome to the next issue of the Tidy Cloud AWS bulletin!
This issue of the bulletin talks about CDK Day, CDK for Terraform, Dagger, and Code Tour.
Enjoy!
CDK Day 2022
It is soon time for CDK Day 2022!
CDK Day is a community-driven event for all toolkits that belong to the Cloud Development Kit family, which includes:
- AWS CDK - The original CDK toolkit for provisioning AWS Cloud infrastructure
- CDKTF - Cloud Development Kit for Terraform, multi-provider/cloud infrastructure provisioning
- CDK8s - CDK for Kubernetes, generate Kubernetes-based solution configurations
- Projen - A CDK-style tool for software project management
All CDKs allow for multiple programming languages to be used to define the target infrastructure or solution configuration. This year is the third year for CDK Day, which will be a virtual event and free to attend, on May 26th 2022. If you are interested in submitting a talk, you have time until April 20th to do that!
For more information about CDK and to register, go to https://www.cdkday.com.
It is a nice event, and it usually has something for both those starting out with any of the CDKs and for experienced CDK users.
CDK for Terraform 0.10
Hashicorp’s Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF) has released its 0.10 release, which includes improvements in outputs for some of the command-line operations, including diff, deploy, and destroy.
They have also added multi-stack deployment support in the workflow, so you can deploy multiple stacks with one command. That also includes reviewing the differences for each stack, automated or manual approvals. It also works with the watch command to track changes across multiple files.
There have been changes in how lists of data are handled, which introduce some breaking changes.
You can read about the update in the Hashicorp blog post: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/cdk-for-terraform-0-10-adds-multi-stack-deployments-and-more
You can also read the upgrade guide to 0.10 if you are running an older version of CDKTF: https://www.terraform.io/cdktf/release/upgrade-guide-v0-10
Dagger
Recently, Dagger got out of its private beta into a public project. It has the ambition to provide a portable toolkit for CI/CD pipelines.
The goal is to define the pipeline logic once and then run that wherever you want, locally on your own computer or with your continuous integration system of choice, on multiple platforms.
I have been in the position myself to deal with multiple pipeline solutions in the same environment, and also to have different tooling in use depending where the pipeline should be. Portable pipeline definitions is a good thing! If there will be more re-usable components coming out of this effort as well, all the better!
The project is still in its early stages. I think it is promising and eager to see where it will go!
Dagger website: https://dagger.io
Launch announcement for Dagger: https://dagger.io/blog/public-launch-announcement
Code Tour
A neat extension to Visual Studio Code (VS Code) that I discovered recently is Code Tour. What this extension does is that it allows you to record tours through a software project. A tour is essentially a set of steps where you can provide descriptions, for example, for specific lines of code, specific files or directories. You can use markdown in the descriptions and you can create links to external resources, to run commands in VS Code, or shell commands, or link to other tours and steps in tours.
I have used this myself and I find it pretty nice to describe certain aspects of a software project, or a way to do guided onboarding into a project.
The tours can be git release aware and tied to specific releases, or to specific branches, or simply be agnostic of git versions (fit any release or branch). You can get notified about potential drift in case a tour is tied to a specific release, for example.
The tour data is saved in separate files, and does not affect your source code or any other files you work with in the project. Just check in the Code Tour files in your version control!
A tip is to save regularly when you edit a step - you must click Save explicitly, and if you navigate away in the VS Code editor to something else, e.g. to check some info you want to include in your step description, you may lose any unsaved data. That has happened to me a few times now…
Check it out at CodeTour page in the Visual Studio Marketplace.
You can find the contents of this bulletin and older ones, and more at Tidy Cloud AWS. You will also find other useful articles around AWS automation and infrastructure-as-software.
Until next time,
/Erik