Our tour of Amazon Web services has taken us through some offerings. When you consider maintaining and reproducing these for your environment, it can seem overwhelming. However, the wizards at AWS have already thought of this and created Cloud Formation
Cloud Formation: Wizards and Scripting
This free service allows you to use JSON or YAML to script out your resources and environment. It may seem daunting and over-technical at first, but it is easy to use. There is support for a graphical approach to building your scripts, or you can edit them directly. Honestly, I can see a high value in both methods. In particular, the templates and quick start tools are perfect to get your scripts 80% or more done. Then you can go in and directly edit them for details like usernames, passwords, and IP addresses.
The scripting does not end at spinning up resources. It allows you to configure them as well. For example, you can script out a WordPress server on EC2 and include the database name, user, password, and the PHP libraries needed to get your instance running immediately. This tool makes it easy to replicate development environments to test and production equivalents and even scale them as needed.
Too Late, I Have Live Systems Already
You might say that this tool would have been great when you started, but now you have your systems built. The smart folks at Amazon thought about that too. They have a tool called CloudFormer that is part of this service. This feature allows you to build a template out of your existing environment. Thus, when you have to replicate your servers or move around resources, you can use a scripted and much less error-prone approach.
Did I mention this is a free tool? The price is perfect for you to spend a few minutes getting to know it and how your administration tasks can become easier. You will be happy you did.
