When you look at Google Cloud services like Source Repository and Cloud Build, you would think it is very easy to create a CI/CD build pipeline. We can tell you: it is! In this blog I will show you how to create a serverless CI/CD pipeline for a Docker image, using three resources in Terraform.

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The Binx team attended Re:Invent 2019 in Las Vegas. Bart Verlaat, Thijs de Vries and Bas Harenslak (GoDataDriven) took a few moments to share their experiences and main take-aways from Amazon Web Services’s main event of the year. Embrace Cloud Top-Down “Fantastic to be part of this with our team. It’s been an amazing week. For me personally, to meet our customers but also the other partners with whom we organized the BeNeLux drinks”, said Verlaat. Read more...

In AWS CloudFormation there is no way to set the active receipt rule set of the AWS Simple Email Service. As we strive for 100% reproducibility, we created a custom resource to do just that.

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Terraform gives you a nice way to orchestrate your Cloud resources. It allows you to organise multiple resources into reusable modules or even separate Terraform runs with data resource as the glue. Maintainability Just like all code it can be challenging to keep maintenance of it from being someone or your own worse nightmare. Typically I find myself moving resources as much as creating them. Especially at the beginning of a project or product, when you create lots of resources. Read more...

Cloud Run is the serverless product on Google Cloud that lets you run serverless containers. After a short period in beta, the product is now generally available and ready for production workloads. Let me tell you three reasons why I think Cloud Run is different!

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In AWS CloudFormation there is no way to generate SES domain identities or obtain the DKIM tokens required to send and receive emails using AWS Simple Email Service. As we strive for 100% reproducibility, we created a custom provider for both the domain identity and DKIM validation tokens. These custom providers return both the tokens and the required DNS record sets which are required to validate the domain and email sender.

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New services do not always deliver support for CloudFormation at the launch. If you work with CloudFormation, you can create a Custom Resource. With the new import functionality, once AWS adds native support for the resource, you can now import this resource into your template and remove the old custom resource. This blog post describes the 4 stages: Create the Custom Resource provider; a lambda function Deploy the resource using the previous Custom Resource provider Import the custom created resource into your stack Remove the custom resource from the stack, leaving the imported for future use In our example we assume SNS Topic is not yet supported by CloudFormation at launch. Read more...

With this Custom Provider you can construct such a deployment package or the objects to be written to an S3 bucket, entirely within CloudFormation. When embedding the objects in the template, the deployment template is versioned and fully deterministic. Introduction Creating a Lambda function with dependencies, or publishing web content to an s3 website bucket typically involves creating a deployment package as a zip file or uploading a set of HTML files and assets to an S3 bucket. Read more...

On AWS we often use the AWS Parameter Store, to store secrets safely. But accessing the secrets from an application running in ECS, is rather intrusive. You have to call the AWS SSM API either in the application or in the entrypoint script of the container. In this blog we show you how a simple utility allows you to specify the references to the secrets as environment variables. It even allows you to specify sensible defaults.

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AWS CloudWatch logs is an useful logging system, but in practice we run into two quircks: It does not allow you to set a default retention period for newly created log groups. Secondly it does not delete empty log streams that are older than the retention period. In this blog we introduce a utility that will fix these two issues. It can be installed as a CLI or deployed as an AWS Lambda.

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