Troposphering

This repo contains a brief introduction to Troposphere, a Python library to create and manage CloudFormation descriptors (templates).

For more info, please check out the blog article I wrote.

Requirements

As a suggestion, use a virtualenv to avoid messing around local Python installations/dependencies.

• troposphere

  pip install troposphere

Schema

.
├── README.md
├── instances
│   ├── instances.py
│   └── instances_input
└── subnets
    ├── subnets.py
    └── subnets_input

Quick start

There are two different scripts (in their folders):

• subnets/subnets.py This will create a template subnets_template.yaml defining a (set of) subnets defined in an input subnets_input.json.

• instances/instances.py This one creates a template instances_template.yaml defining an (set of) instance and security group(s) defined in an input instances_input.json.

The second script (instances) is dependant on the first one, as it will use the subnets declared/created in the prior stack.

First, modify each _input file and add your current AWS account values, such as:

• VPC ID.
• Region.
• Resource name(s).
• (optional) Common tags to add.

Once done, change the name to be <script_name>_input.json.

Now you are ready to go.

cd subnets/
python3 subnets.py

It will create a template (YAML) file called subnets_template.yaml where you can check all resources being defined.

This template then can be used as file input for a CloudFormation stack creation, as so:

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name AddingSubnetsWithTroposphere --template-body file://subnets_template.yaml

Same within instances/ to create the second stack.

These scripts are guidelines with basic features that can be extended with both Python blessings and CloudFormation flexibility. E.g. one could define a map of regions vs availabilityZones or AMIs per region, etc, to be used later on when creating the instance(s).

Next step(s)

• Automate CFN stack creation.