pulumi-aws-django VS ecs-refarch-cloudformation

pulumi-aws-django

Pulumi Component Library: github.com/briancaffey/pulumi-aws-django

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.