Recent Articles on the tecRacer AWS Blog

Bridging the terraform - CloudFormation gap

CloudFormation does not cover all AWS Resource types. Terraform does a better job in covering resource types just in time. So if you want to use a resource type which CloudFormation does not support yet, but you want to use CloudFormation, you have to build a Custom Resource with an own Lambda Function. CDK to the rescue: use AwsCustomResource.

tecRacer is Chef Partner of the Year Financial Services

ChefConf Online started this year with a big announcement for us. We have received the Chef Hartman award as “Partner of the year Financial Services”! This special award goes to companies that drove successful customer outcomes, developed special solution expertise and leveraged Chef’s GTM to drive growth. It makes us proud to be part of the whole Chef world. Thank you Chef, thank you Barry for this award!

Building a static website with Hugo and the CDK

Building a static website with Hugo and the CDK If you ever wanted to host your personal website or blog on AWS this article is right for you. We’re going to build a static website with Hugo, CodeBuild and CodePipeline and host it using CloudFront and S3. We will set up everything you need to build and deploy new versions of the Website.

Testing Physical Machines with kitchen-static

Testing on Physical Machines with kitchen-static This article shows how to work with Test Kitchen on physical machines using the kitchen-static Driver. If you need to deliver a product (bundle of server and software) instead of just configuration, some tasks cannot be run on virtual machines alone but need testing on actual hardware.

Rotate your credentials and don't forget MFA

According to the Well-Architected Framework and the least privileges principle, you should change your access keys and login password regularly. Therefore the user should have the right to edit their credentials. But only their own. Also using MFA - multi-factor authentication enhances the security even more. Therefore the user should be able to change MFA. But only their own. But how to do that? You have to combine two parts of AWS documentation. We will show you how you provide a “self-editing” group for your users with the CDK.

Building a Fargate-based container app with Cognito Authentication

In this post I’m going to show you how to use Cognito User Authentication in combination with a Docker app running in Fargate behind an Application Load Balancer and we’re going to build all this with the Cloud Development Kit (CDK). Why would you want to use this? You’re running your web application inside a docker container and don’t want to deal with user authentication.

The declarative vs imperative Infrastructure as Code discussion is flawed

“Infrastructure definition has to be declarative”. Let’s see where this presumption gets us. My guess why some ops guys prefer pure terraform or CloudFormation is that these languages seem to be easier to understand. There is precisely one way of creating a specific resource in the language. If you use a programming language, there are many ways to solve one specific problem. The problem which could occur later in the project is that both declarative languages have boundaries in what they can do, with a programming language you do not have these boundaries.