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CloudFormation Point-of-Change Compliance: Hooks First Impressions

Intro  Security and compliance controls are an important part of the software development life cycle.  When organizations and teams move software delivery from months to hours, the processes related to compliance evaluation can become a bottleneck for delivery.  In his article, “Compliance in a DevOps Culture,” Carl Nygard outlines different approaches teams can take to Read more…

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Abort, Rollback…Retry? Upcoming updates to CloudFormation

Upcoming updates to CloudFormation to enable faster and more productive development.  Cloudformation templates are incredibly expressive, providing the ability to automate resource creation and configuration of many AWS services and create custom resources to accomplish an unlimited number of tasks. Cloudformation, by default, treats these stacks as single units while they are being created. If Read more…

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Stelligent U: Onboarding New Hires with a Standard Development Environment

Let’s imagine this scenario: Today is the first day of your new gig. With overwhelming nervous energy, you’re awake so early you wonder how people normally wake up at this hour, you even combed your hair today (maybe even showered?) and you’re ready to put your best foot forward and conquer the world. You have Read more…

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Infrastructure as Code and Stelligent U

At Stelligent, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is foundational to our mantra of “Automate Everything”. This is reflected in our new engineer training, Stelligent U, which has recently been open-sourced. Throughout the training, we focus on creating and updating resources via CloudFormation. Even with templates provided as reference, the engineer is the ultimate decision-maker for building Read more…

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Using Dependabot with AWS CodeCommit

Introduction In the DevSecOps world, maintaining code dependencies is key to acquiring the latest security vulnerability updates, bug fixes, and new features.  While locking down to “known-good” revisions of dependencies may avoid potential bugs and incompatibilities during continuous integration, critical updates could be missed.  Dependabot provides an automated solution to dependency management that can be Read more…

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Deleting a Stuck CloudFormation Stack

One of the things I have come across many times over the years is attempting to delete an AWS CloudFormation Stack and getting an error like this: Role arn:aws:iam::123456789012:role/CloudFormationTrustRole-2CDE9F7RUUTH is invalid or cannot be assumed In this case, an IAM Role used by the stack either got deleted manually or by another stack when it Read more…

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Is Your Pipeline Ready to Speak ARM

This first half of this year featured lots of news about Arm processors (previously ARM) that culminated in three major announcements. The first was the general availability announcement from AWS of M6g Instances, powered by AWS Graviton2 processors in May. In June, Apple announced that they were migrating desktops and laptops to new Arm based Read more…

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Running Serverless Canary Deployments with AWS SAM

Many of us know that introducing large batches of changes into production is risky. However, because of complexity and many moving parts, it can also be risky when deploying changes in small batches – without the right techniques. One of the better ways of mitigating deployment risk is by gradually deploying small and frequent changes Read more…

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DevOps on AWS Radio: Kinnaird McQuade – Policy Sentry and Cloudsplaining, Stelligent Book Club (Episode 28)

In this episode, Kinnaird McQuade, Lead Cloud Security Engineer at Salesforce, joins us to talk about his tools Cloudsplaining and Policy Sentry. Policy Sentry provides a framework for writing IAM policies to make it easier to create least privilege policies. Cloudsplaining can help find policies that may allow more access than required. Keith Monihen joins Read more…

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Continuous Deployment for Serverless Applications on AWS

When using serverless on AWS, you do not need to worry about load balancing, auto scaling, operating system management, managing utilization, or underlying hardware failures. All of it is abstracted from you so that you can focus on coding. What’s more, since you only pay for what you use, you can do more experimentation. It Read more…