Deploying and Managing Infrastructure at Scale Section

Is a declarative way of outlining your AWS infrastructure.
For example you can say; "I want a security group, 2 EC2 instances using this security group, a S3 bucket, and a ELB in front of these machines."
CloudFormation will then create these for you in the right order with the exact configuration that you specify.
Benefits:
- Infrastructure as code (resources aren't manually created, which is good for control).
- Cost:
  - Easy to see how much a stack costs you as its tagged with an identifier
  - You can estimate costs of resources using CloudFormation template.
  - Savings strategy: In development you could automate deletion of templates at 5PM and recreate at 8AM safely.
- Productivity: destroy and re-create infrastructure with ease on the go.
- Don't re-invent the wheel: leverage existing templates on the web.
- Supports just about all AWS resources.
CloudFormation Stack Designer allows us to see all our resources and the relations between components.

Allows us to define our cloud infrastructure in a familiar language (JavaScript, Python, Java, .NET).
This code is then compiled into a CloudFormation Template (JSON/YAML).
This allows is to deploy infrastructure and application runtime code together.

Is a developer centric view of deploying an application on AWS.
Beanstalk is a PaaS and is free but you pay for the underlying instances.
Managed Service:
- Instance configuration / OS handled by Beanstalk.
- Deployment strategy is configurable but performed by Elastic Beanstalk.
- Capacity provisioning.
- Load balancing & auto-scaling.
- Application health-monitoring & responsiveness.
Only the application code is the responsibility of the developer.
3 Architecture models:
- Single instance deployment: good for development.
- LB + ASG: good for production or pre-production web apps.
- ASG only: great for non-web apps in production (ie. workers).
Health Monitoring
- Health Agent pushes metrics to CloudWatch.
- Checks for app health, publishes health events.

We need to store the code somewhere before publishing it to servers.
Similar to GitHub but for AWS.
Source-control service to host git-based repos.
Benefits
- Fully managed.
- Scalable & highly available.
- Private, Secured, Integrated with AWS.

Code building service in the cloud.
Compiles source code, run tests, and produces packages that are ready to be deployed.
Think of it as the middle man, it gets the code from CodeCommit, builds it and gets it ready for CodeDeploy.
Benefits:
- Fully managed and serverless.
- Continuously scalable & highly available.
- Secure.
- Pay as you go pricing.

Orchestrate the different steps to have the code automatically pushed to production.
Code -> Build -> Test -> Provision -> Deploy
Basis for Continuous Integration & Continuous Delivery.
Benefits
- Fully managed.
- Compatible with CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, Elastic Beanstalk, CloudFormation, 3rd-party services (GitHub), custom plugins...
- Fast delivery & rapid updates.

Storing and Retrieving dependencies is called artifact management.
CodeArtifact is a secure, scalable, and cost-effective way to manage artifacts for software development.
Works with common dependency management tools like Maven, Gradle, npm, yarn, pip, etc.
Developers and CodeBuild can then retrieve dependencies straight from CodeArtifact.

Unified UI to easily manage software development activities in one place.
Is a nice way to make sure you are getting started correctly when setting up all your development services.
Can edit the code "in the cloud" using AWS Cloud9.

Helps you manage your EC2 and On-Premises systems at scale.
A hybrid AWS service.
Get operational insights about the state of your infrastructure.
Most import features:
- Patching automation for enhanced compliance.
- Run commands across entire fleet of servers.
- Store parameter configuration with SSM Parameter Store.
Works for Linux, Windows, MacOS, Raspbian.

How Does a Systems Manager Work?

You need to install the System Manager (SSM) agent onto the systems we control.
Installed by default on Amazon Linux AMI & some Ubuntu AMI.
If an instance can't be controlled with SSM, it's probably an issue with the SSM agent.
Thanks to the SSM agent we can run commands, patch & configure our servers.

SSM Session Manager

Allows you to start a secure shell on your EC2 and on-premises servers.
No SSH access, bastion hosts, or SSH keys needed.
No port 22 needed (better security).
Supports Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Send session log data to S3 or CloudWatch Logs.
We want to give our instance a role with AmazonSSMManagedInstanceCore permissions.

Systems Manager Parameter Store