How to use Rise AWS Foundation

Introduction

Rise AWS Foundation helps you:

• Create AWS resources
• Act on those AWS resources

Creating AWS resources

CloudFormation is the best way to create resources in aws. Without Cloudformation, you would have to execute individual sdk calls to create resources. This gets very complicated when creating multiple resources when they depend on eachother. You will need to create resources in the correct order, and you will need to write clean up logic if there is a failure in creating a resource in the middle of the creation order.

CloudFormation handles all of this for you. All you need to do is define a list of resources, CloudFormation will take care of creating them in the correct order, and will take care of cleaning up resources if there is a deployment failure. Cloudformation keeps a record of all your deployments, and lists all events in each deployment. CloudFormation also enables you to define outputs, properties about your deployed resources that are available for reference. This is very good for exposing values that are genereted during deployment such as S3 Bucket names or Lambda Function names.

For these reasons, Rise AWS Foundation has no methods for creating AWS resources with the sdk directly, but instead has methods for creating CloudFormation templates snippets. Once all AWS resources are defined in templates snippets, we can combine them into 1 template and use the CloudFormation methods to deploy that template.

How CloudFormation is created in AWS Foundation

These create methods will always return the following:

const result = exampleResource.cf.create()
// Result will look like the following:
const myResult = {
    Resources: {
        MyAWSResource: {
            // ... CloudFormation Definition
        },
        MyAWSResource2: {
            // ... CloudFormation Definition
        }
    },
    Outputs: {
        MyResourceId: '234324233'
    }
}

You may create alot of resources. How do you combine them into 1 CloudFormation template to deploy? Because we can depend on every method to output the above structure, we can combine by doing the following:

const result1 = lambda.makeLambda()
const result2 = db.makeDb()
const result3 = api.makeApi()

const template = {
    Resources: {
        ...result1.Resources,
        ...result2.Resources,
        ...result3.Resources
    },
    Outputs: {
        ...result1.Outputs,
        ...result2.Outputs,
        ...result3.Outputs
    }
}

We can now deploy this template using the CloudFormation methods in AWS Foundation:

import * as aws from 'rise-aws-foundation'
const createResult = await aws.cloudformation.deployStack({
    name: 'mystack',
    template: JSON.stringify(template)
})