former2 VS 0x4447_product_s3_email

Former2 is a tool that automates the creation of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) scripts from existing AWS resources. It utilizes the AWS JavaScript SDK to scan the user’s AWS infrastructure, identifying all available resources. Users can then select from this list which resources they want to include in their IaC outputs. This process simplifies the task of writing IaC scripts, especially for complex environments, by directly converting current AWS configurations into ready-to-use code. Former2 is particularly useful for documenting existing infrastructure or for migrating manually created resources into an IaC framework.

More info: https://github.com/iann0036/former2

You can use tools like https://github.com/cycloidio/terracognita or https://github.com/iann0036/former2 to generate the terraform code for you. Then you can consolidate them and if they are simply the same type of objects with different values then you can use terragrunt to pass values to your terraform module.

I have never tried out this tool, but maybe it's worth checking: you could create all the stuff via AWS Console in a sandbox environment and then try to use former2. Nothing autogenerated will ever be good enough compared to handcrafted, but it should give you a nice starting point without much effort.Such a tool can not be expected to work reliably. Thankfully, you need to cover only classic, foundational services like EC2, ELB, and IAM, so I would expect them to work properly for those use cases.

Author of Former2 here.

I've heard of a few people setting up pipelines that use the CLI with the `ALL` services option to generate inventories of their systems, but the generated template would almost certainly not work out of the box due to:

Not quite: a command line tool is also available: https://github.com/iann0036/former2/blob/master/cli/README.md

Here is something on GitHub that roughly follows this paradigm, and was made to use SES as the "email server".

- https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

> Could there be a serverless alternative where the service wakes up only to receive emails and will be charged only when emails are processed, filtered and served & rest of the time no charge - avoiding $3 to $5 charged by behemoths per inbox?

I love ideas as much as the next guy and serverless email is kind of floating out there:

https://medium.com/schibsted-engineering/building-a-serverle...

https://github.com/arithmetric/aws-lambda-ses-forwarder

https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

It's possible to build it, but the problem is that you still have the same problem of deliverability. Obviously it works fine/great for receving emails though.

> Idea is how cheap can it go for personal inbox with all the features denied by the superlative pricing plans

It could get really cheap, but would people buy it? I always wonder if price is really the limiting factor for self hosted emails.

Zoho is already QUITE cheap: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

Maybe this would work as a business, but it's a bit questionable to me.

Based on your description I think this project is for you: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email - it dose what you are looking for, I hope this helps.

Here is a complete solution that hopefully gives you some ideas for a more simplified approach based on your needs. https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email

> What do you think about this page: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-started/

It is very dangerous. If you select the full-stack tutorial you get: "Time to Complete 30 minutes". It should say: "30 min to ruin your life" ;)

If you want to really learn AWS, then this page should be used as a reference of how to design a stack. If I were you I would read the tutorials to see which services are needed for a solution, but before doing anything, I would read the docs for each of those services to really understand them, then I would go back to the tutorial and actually do it, and - MOST IMPORTANTLY - I would read the pricing page for each service that you are going to use.

> Do you think it's irresponsible for AWS to encourage beginners to try their service when they apparently only intend it to be used by those with a computer science degree and 5-year apprenticeship under an experienced sysadmin?

100% - when I started working with AWS in 2016 I had a very hard time figuring it out, because I was looking for the simplicity the the marketing team was writing about. I really don't like what the marketing team tries to tell you, because it dose not exist.

Regarding an approach to learn about AWS, I would start with all the serverless services that they have, since the pricing for most of them is ideal for beginners (WARNING - read the pricing page for each since not all have a free staring plane, like S3 and DynamoDB) and for simple weekend projects.

For example, I did build this project a while ago: https://github.com/0x4447/0x4447_product_s3_email, if you scroll down to the pricing section you will see this:

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