Articles tagged with "stepfunctions"

Build Golden AMIs with Packer and AWS CodePipeline

When leveraging AWS services such as EC2, ECS, or EKS, achieving standardized and automated image creation and configuration is essential for securely managing workloads at scale. The concept of a Golden AMI is often used in this context. Golden AMIs represent pre-configured, hardened and thoroughly tested machine images that encompass a fully configured operating system, essential software packages, and customizations tailored for specific workload. It is also strongly recommended to conduct comprehensive security scans during the image creation process to mitigate the risk of vulnerabilities. By adopting Golden AMIs, you can ensure consitent configuration across different environments, leading to decreased setup and deployment times, fewer configuration errors, and a diminished risk of security breaches. In this blog post, I would like to demonstrate how you can leverage AWS CodePipeline and AWS Stepfunctions, along with Terraform and Packer, to establish a fully automated pipeline for creating Golden AMIs.

Handling Errors and Retries in StepFunctions

“Everything fails all the time” has been preached to us by Werner Vogels for a few years now. Every engineer working on building and maintaining systems knows this to be true. Distributed systems come with their own kind of challenges, and one of the AWS services that help deal with those is AWS Step Functions. AWS Step Functions allow you to describe workflows as JSON and will execute those workflows for you. In this blog, we’ll explore what happens when things inevitably go wrong and the options the service offers to perform error handling and retries using an example application.

Step functions and the source

Possibilities of using AWS Step Functions are widespread. Most times, filtering out the necessary content is done within Lambda Functions or other services. With this blog, I will show you how to prevent this within Lambda using in- and output filters in AWS Step Functions.