This project includes some simple and more advanced CloudFormation examples. It also shows how Lambda can be used to power a Custom Resource within a more advanced example and how it can also be used to create a rudimentary Platform as a Service by listening for events.
I walked through this demo at the UK AWS User Group in August 2016; it gives some useful context.
There are three demo CloudFormation templates:
- Simple Example: Flask app in an autoscale group behind an ELB
- VPC Example: The Simple Example but in a custom VPC
- HTTPS Example: The VPC Example but behind Route53 and using SSL certificates on the ELB and to secure the backend connection
The third example shows how Lambda can power a Custom Resource to create SSL certificates.
This repo also includes another Lambda function which can be used with HTTPS Example to make something which looks a little like a Platform as a Service (PaaS). This Lambda subscribes to DynamoDB and CloudFormation events to create, update and delete CloudFormation stacks and to update the DynamoDB Table with the results of those changes.
Although similar in principle to how we build our infrastructure at drie; I have taken a number of horrible shortcuts to simplify things. For example things go horribly wrong if two apps have the same name and this doesn't encrypt the backend SSL certificates.
This demo was created using Ubuntu 15.04 with Python 2.7. It might work with other stacks but it hasn't been tested.
Some of the demos need some existing AWS resources (e.g. a DynamoDB Table). If there is sufficient interest, I'll put
together a CloudFormation template to set these up; in the mean time there are instructions on what you need in the
various READMEs. The demo will only work in us-east-1 or eu-west-1; other regions can be supported by updating
the Mapping sections of the CloudFormation templates with details of alternative AMIs.