ecs-refarch-cloudformation VS projen

I first started out with IaC following this project aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation (which is pretty old at this point) and wrote a lot of CloudFormation by hand. The pain of doing that lead me to explore the CDK with Python. I learned TypeScript by rewriting the Python CDK code I wrote in TypeScript. I later worked with a team that was more experienced in Terraform and learned how to use that. I feel like Pulumi takes the best of the two tools and has a really great developer experience. There is a little bit of a learning curve with Pulumi, and you give up some of the simplicity of Terraform.

Yes, deploy them as nested stacks inside a parent template. You can reference outputs via !GetAtt NestedStackX.Outputs.OutputName. see this repo for an example https://github.com/aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation

Sure. My IaC journey actually started out with CloudFormation, and I learned a lot from this reference project: aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation. Then I picked up CDK when that became available and migrated a project from CloudFormation to CDK. It sounded like a nicer way to handle stacks in a familiar language with lots great one-liners and utility functions and constructs, and it definitely is. I have a similar project written in CDK that is an application/framework-first (Django) approach to learning and doing IaC that you can find here: https://github.com/briancaffey/django-cdk. This implements both ECS and EKS, but my attempts at learning EKS sort of fizzled out for now as I don't have the need to use it, and for the task at hand (running a monolithic Django application on AWS) I think ECS makes a LOT more sense.

I'm mostly using just EC2 instances running Docker Engine and Docker Compose (with configs and Compose projects in Git), but I'm starting to use CloudFormation and ECS more. I've taken a lot of inspiration from https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-refarch-shibboleth, https://github.com/awslabs/ecs-refarch-continuous-deployment, and https://github.com/aws-samples/ecs-refarch-cloudformation. At some point in the future, I plan to refactor my CloudFormation/ECS deployments into something more cloud agnostic using Terraform/Kubernetes.

If you need more options that is provided the Docker/ECS tool listed above you can roll your own using CloudFormation (the AWS deployment scripting tool). There's a good starter here.

This project uses AWS CDK as infrastructure as code solution. To maintain project configuration files efficiently, the project structure is generated using projen:

I recommend visiting the github page for projen and flicking through the documentation as I won't do it justice. Projen aims to:

cdk-django uses projen for maintaining the changelog and bumping versions and publishing to npm. It is popular among developers in the CDK community and is a really awesome tool since it basically uses one file (.projenrc.ts) to configure your entire repo, including files like tsconfig.json, package.json, and even GitHub Action workflows. It has a lot of configuration options, but I'm using it in a pretty simple way. It generates a new release and items to the changelog when I manually trigger a GitHub Action.

I will give you step-by-step instructions to create your very first AWS Organization with the AWS CDK and the help of projen and cdk-organizations. You only need already an AWS Account created which is not a member or management account of another AWS Organization.

If you go down that route you should use Projen to maintain the dependencies.

An Open Source CDK Community project which I find super interesting. It is doing cherry-picking from AWS Amplify UI and AWS CDK for deployment. I do that in my private projects as well for example https://github.com/senjuns/senjuns. I think the author could enhance/simplify its repo even more by using https://github.com/projen/projen for the project setup.

That said - https://github.com/firecracker-microvm/firecracker and https://github.com/bottlerocket-os/bottlerocket are interesting, and while AWS CDK is very AWS specific, the underlying jsii https://github.com/aws/jsii and projen https://github.com/projen/projen/issues are fundamental services.

The documentation for the classes of the bundled project types is at https://github.com/projen/projen/. In this documentation, you can see that the property github includes a mergify entry, which will define if the Mergify configuration is used. The default if the github entry is not specified, is that it will be included. So in our test, we can check that this configuration is not in place, after creating a project with the mandatory parameters.