Hello all!
Welcome to the next issue of the Tidy Cloud AWS bulletin! In this issue we have a bit on juggling credentials for multiple AWS accounts (Cloudglance), EKS Blueprints for easier management of Kubernetes-based infrastructure on AWS and a bit on learning DevOps.
Enjoy!
Cloudglance
Cloudglance is a tool that aims to facilitate handling credentials for many AWS accounts and access to resources in these accounts. It is still in the early stages, but looks promising.
It is like Granted, but adds some team collaboration and bastion host/ssh port forwarding handling and is a bit more GUI oriented.
Both tools provide support for juggling multiple AWS accounts at their cores, but focuses on slightly different use cases in that context it seems.
I am looking forward to see how Cloudglance develops!
EKS Blueprints
Kubernetes is a tool for container orchestration that is used more and more. It is very capable and has a large ecosystem around it. It is also complex, and even though many of the cloud providers provide managed Kubernetes services, it is still quite complex.
AWS released not too long ago a solution package called EKS Blueprints. It aims to provide well-architected patterns for using Kubernetes in a more easy-to-use way, using AWS EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) as a foundation.
A blueprint is a combination of EKS cluster, team definitions and components running inside the Kubernetes cluster to support various types of workloads. This includes setting up metrics, loggings, continuous delivery pipelines and more, with many add-ons packaged and ready to use.
Teams include platform and application teams, defining what they will have access to as part of the Kubernetes setup in EKS through IAM.
The blueprint is available as an NPM package and EKS blueprints have been built using AWS CDK.
There is a self-paced workshop website to learn more about EKS blueprints and how to use it. A recent blog post also outlines using EKS Blueprints to set up EKS clusters and have a Gitops style continuous deployment, using ArgoCD.
I think this is a good example of using tools like AWS CDK to package and build re-usable components to make tasks easier to manage. Good work from AWS!
DevOps roadmap
The term DevOps means slightly different things to different people. It was originally more of an organisational culture for different groups (developers, operations, sales, marketing etc) to work towards goals of the business. It has, however, also become a term to describe certain roles and tasks that have developed over the past years.
People interested in learning about challenges around infrastructure and software solution delivery may struggle with what to study, since there can be so many things. Truth is that it will be contextual, different organisations will have different levels of maturity and focus.
Understanding some core fundamentals around culture and ways of working a good starting point, then one can go into various specific tools and systems.
In that regard, I think the Reddit Monthly Getting Into DevOps thread has some good references to material to study.
This also includes multiple roadmap definitions. One which I like is DevOps Roadmap. It is covering a lot of ground and has a nice overview with clickable sections that expand with further material to look at. I do not think you need to learn all those areas in the order presented there, it will depend on the specific place or organisation you are in.
But it is a great starting point to get some idea what to learn and study, if you feel lost.
You can find the contents of this bulletin and older ones, and more at Cloudgnosis.org. You will also find other useful articles around AWS automation and infrastructure-as-software.
Until next time,
/Erik