terratag VS cfn-python-lint

‍Terratag is a tool designed to assign tags or labels to a complete collection of Terraform or Terragrunt files. It enables applying tags or labels to resources within AWS, GCP, and Azure.

Terratag (tagging): https://github.com/env0/terratag (disclaimer, I am CEO at env0)

Documentation:

Cost:Infracost (estimation): https://github.com/infracost/infracostTerratag (tagging): https://github.com/env0/terratag (disclaimer, I am CEO at env0)

🏷 Terratag is a CLI tool allowing for tags or labels to be applied across an entire set of Terraform files.

Now the first 3 options are pretty straight forward. The template itself is a bit more complicated. In my example I used an inline template, I did this for the sake of this blog. But you can also reference an existing object on S3. This way you can use linting tools like cfn-lint on your conformance pack. This will reduce errors during deployment as you can catch them before you commit and push your code.

Automate testing and validation: Before deploying your templates, it's important to test and validate them to ensure that they will work as expected. Use tools like AWS CloudFormation Linter and Azure Resource Manager Template Tester to automate this process.

Honestly I've had good luck writing clean Cloud Formation. It's AWS only. But Nested Stacks can help keep things pretty clean and tools like cfn-lint do a pretty good job of preventing you from going too crazy with spaghetti code. Additionally, as it's all json/yaml, you can parse it to look for common problems your organization wants to enforce. So you can ensure things like specific tags your roles/vpc etc..., or usage of an "approved" set of AMI, requiring an EKS/RDS cluster to be split across availability zones; they're all just a test in your CI pipeline away.

CodeBuild will run a linting check against the CloudFormation Template using cfn-lint and will then run cfn-nag to check for patterns that indicate insecure resources within the CloudFormation template.

A linter for our AWSCloudformation stack called cfn-lint

cfn-lint and cfn_nag or other tools of that nature to check as you write so you don't need to continually try to deploy only to find that you've done something dumb.

https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cfn-lint as mentioned will do what you've explicitly called-out.

cfn-lint can do basic validation and rule-based linting. Highly recommend using it even if it doesn't solve your problem.

To help validate your AWS CloudFormation templates you can use a tool called cfn-lint.