cloud-radar VS sysbox

I'm the author of Cloud-Radar, a Cloudformation testing framework written in Python. I just released v0.7.0 which had some major user experience improvements and I wanted to share it with all of you.

But I think it's okay if you like Cloudformation. In fact, I have another project that you will love. I created a testing framework for Cloudformation templates called Cloud-Radar. It allows you to test your templates locally without credentials. https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/cloud-radar

Final follow up ;)

If you like Cloudformation, you might be interested in my Cloudformation testing library.

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/cloud-radar

It's the most powerful Cloudformation testing framework that exists.

It allows you to unit test your Templates locally with out deploying resources. That also means you don't need valid AWS creds while unit testing.

If you are using cloudformation, I have a python testing library https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/cloud-radar

It allows unit testing of cloudformation templates locally without needing aws credentials or deploying anything.

It also supports functional testing of cloudformation stacks once they are deployed.

Full guide on my blog https://la-tech.co/post/hypermodern-cloudformation/getting-s...

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/jenkins-std-lib A Jenkins shared library with a couple cool things like running GitHub Actions on Jenkins.

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/cloud-radar Unit and Functional testing of AWS Cloudformation templates. The unit testing part allows you to test locally without needing AWS creds.

https://github.com/DontShaveTheYak/sebs Stateful Elastic Block Storage was created so that you could make sure that a AWS ec2 instance always had the same EBS volume mounted to it. Really handy for a Ec2 instance in an ASG with a count of 1.

I created a tool called cloud-radar that would allow me to test the logic that is inside of a Cloudformation templates. Things like the conditionals and intrinsic functions. This all happens locally without deploying and worrying about credentials or assuming roles. You can take a template like this and test it like this:

Yes, I first learned this and the name "splay" from CFengine, back in the day.

I put together a small busybox-like collection of sysadmin tools, and one of the subcommands is "splay" to sleep for a random amount of time. It's one of those things that is useful surprisingly often, even outside cron.

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I remember in 1999 there was a project to reimplement a bunch of these tools in perl:

https://perlpowertools.com/

I even contributed a little, back then. I guess writing basic versions of "ls", for example, is trivial. But there's a lot of work getting all the tools done, with all the flags implemented and behaving as expected.

I guess there are tools like busybox, toybox, and similar, which also implement a lot of "stuff" to varying degrees of completion. From my side the biggest takeaway from those projects is the sheer convenience of deploying a single binary and installing symlinks to change functionality.

I replicated something similar with my sysbox project, collecting tools together in one golang binary with various subcommands:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

I use at least one of those tools on a daily basis, though I suspect they're not so universally useful.

If you've got perl installed you'll might have a "GET" binary present, mine is /usr/bin/GET, which comes with the WWW-module.

Although this is written in portable perl, rather than being compiled, so the static vs. dynamic choice doesn't really mean much it is a simple alternative.

Otherwise I built a simple busybox-inspired collection of tools, written in golang, which includes a simple HTTP client too:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are just a couple of examples, I'm certain there are multiple other choices out there. But I guess curl is ubiquitous enough that most people just use it directly, and add it when missing!

That's pretty cool.

I wrote something similar in my static collection of sysadmin tools - https://github.com/skx/sysbox - In my simple pre-processor I only allow two special things:

#include "file/goes/here"

I bundled together a small collection of sysadmin/scripting-tools here:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Those are probably amongst the things that I use most often which are non-standard.

I used to have very full ~/bin, and ~/$(hostname), directories. In the end I pared them back and started bundling things together in one binary.

The end result is very similar to this approach, I run "sysbox blah", or "sysbox help", and use integrated subcommands.

Very helpful and makes deployment easy by having only a single binary:

https://github.com/skx/sysbox

Not bash/shell, but similar and useful idea to experiment with.

I support that in my sysbox utility-box, via the subcommands processor, and it is very helpful.