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    Five worst things in AWS CloudFormation ☶ go release appliscale.io
    afronski avatar authored by afronski 4 months ago | cached | 4 comments

Me, together with the team - based on our experiences - are working on a tool that helps create, manage and maintain the CloudFormation templates and stacks built from those.

Here is the tool: https://github.com/appliscale/perun

We are looking for community feedback and validation - comments and ideas are welcome! The same goes with pull-requests. Feel free to share your thoughts and opinions here as well!

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    hwayne avatar hwayne 4 months ago | link

    Endless repetitions – we need to repeat constantly when writing it. It is error-prone as well as hard to maintain. YAML and JSON flavors do not support any fragments or smaller templating engine, so it is difficult to reuse and work in line with DRY (don’t repeat yourself) principle.

    Is this something you can get with node anchors?

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      afronski avatar afronski edited 4 months ago | link

      Great question! I believe you can’t, I’ve tried while ago.

      TL;DR: CloudFormation does not support that, see here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-formats.html - it does not support hash merges, effectively you cannot use anchors.

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      jclulow avatar jclulow 4 months ago | link

      Working on a tool which is effectively a layer on top of an Amazon service feels like a risky business. If you demonstrate that the need exists, what’s to stop them waking up tomorrow to quickly build an in-house duplicate?

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        afronski avatar afronski 4 months ago | link

        Nothing. ;) If AWS will build something better, that’s a great thing - way to go!

        It’s not our primary business. We would love to have such facilities in place already. We build that tool in order to ease the pain regarding maintaining a pile of templates - for our convenience.