Infrastructure As Code With humidifier-reservoir

A little more than a year ago we made the first commit to the gem that eventually became humidifier. It’s evolved quite a bit in the last year, including integrating AWS’ resource specification which had the side-effect of greatly stabilizing the API. Here at Localytics, we’ve been using humidifier in myriad ways, including managing our AWS infrastructure, launching and configuring new servers, and aiding in refactoring our network ACLs for better security (to name a few).

Today we are open-sourcing humidifier-reservoir, a tool for building AWS infrastructure using humidifier and simple configuration files. This tool has evolved out of our continued effort to streamline our infrastructure while maintaining the configurability that we’ve worked hard to build into humidifier. Below are descriptions and examples on why we built humidifier-reservoir and how you can integrate it into your workflow.

Flexibility

First and foremost, we originally built humidifier with flexibility in mind. Previously we had evaluated other excellent tools like Terraform, Ansible, and SparkleFormation. All of these tools work well and are well-supported by the community; however, we wanted something that was both more tightly integrated with AWS CloudFormation and that also allowed us more configuration options that were specific to AWS.

When working with humidifier, we found that it was great for dynamic infrastructure - or, infrastructure that changed regularly (e.g., auto-scaling groups for new application versions and their associated target groups). The weakness, however, came from static infrastructure. When we used humidifier to create AWS components that weren’t changing regularly, we ended up duplicating a lot of the functionality in infrastructure configuration tools, with even more boilerplate.

In order words, the flexibility of humidifier was outweighed by the burden of having to write everything in code. We ended up determining that the best way forward was to take the best of both worlds - the flexibility of humidifier with the simplicity of non-code configuration files. That resulted in the birth of humidifier-reservoir.

Configuration

humidifier-reservoir allows you to map 1-to-1 resource attributes to resources that can be immediately deployed to CloudFormation. It also allows you to define custom attributes that you can then use humidifier to further configure to your needs. For example, you can specify a couple of AWS IAM users in a users.yml file:

EngUser:
  path: /reservoir/
  user_name: EngUser
  groups:
  - Engineering
  - Testing
  - Deployment

AdminUser:
  path: /reservoir/
  user_name: AdminUser
  groups:
  - Management
  - Administration

In the above example, path, user_name, and groups are all part of the CloudFormation resource specification, so they go straight through into the resultant JSON. Using humidifier-reservoir, you can simplify this further by defining a custom mapping like so:

With this mapping in place, your configuration can be simplified down to:

EngUser:
  group: eng

AdminUser:
  group: admin

This can greatly increase the speed with which you can develop CloudFormation templates, and ultimately makes it easier to deploy them. Finally, using tools already built into humidifier, you can deploy each change incrementally using change sets to view each change as it happens.

Cogito

Further improvements to process can be gained by combining these two open-source AWS infrastructure tools with our third tool: cogito. With some simple code, you can take cogito-syntax IAM statements in deploy them into CloudFormation templates, as in:

(In the above example, replace the underscores with /, as it should be in nested subdirectories.)

Then by running the ./reservoir CLI, you will have a valid CloudFormation document that you can deploy immediately.

Lessons learned

At Localytics, we are always working on making our tools better and examining our processes for potential gains. For us, this represented a large speed gain in managing and maintaining CloudFormation templates. By keeping configuration files in a single repository and building tooling around it using humidifier-reservoir, all of our static infrastructure can now be deployed into CloudFormation templates using a simple CLI. Furthermore, changing our existing infrastructure is just a matter of opening a pull request.

humidifier-reservoir is up on GitHub here and free for use. When you use it, please share your experience, approach, and any feedback in a gist, on a blog, or in the comments.