AWS in the real world: Automation with Ansible, CloudFormation and more.

This week we will have a live demonstration and discussion about a real life automation solution. You will see how AWS CloudFormation and Ansible can work together to deploy a 3 tier multiserver architecture.

CloudFormation is a tool provided by AWS to manage a collection of related AWS resources by writing JSON templates to describe the resources and any dependencies.

Ansible is an agentless SSH based application deployment, configuration management, and orcestration tool.

The demonstration will feature the live deployment of an Amazon VPC, NAT server, RDS database server, a cluster of 2 EC2 instances with the Alfresco enterprise content management system automatically installed, and an ELB. From start to finish this only involves inputting the initial build parameters.

About the Presenter: Michael McCarthy is a veteran software engineer and architect. He is the founder of Tribloom Inc, a software consulting group focused on enterprise content management, AWS, and managed application hosting. Michael has been working actively with AWS since 2011 and currently has 4 AWS certifications (Developer, SySops Administrator, Solutions Architect, and DevOps Engineer). From the start, he realized the benefits of software controlled infrastrucute and began automating as much as possible. After trying several solutions, his current favorite is a combination of CloudFormation and Ansible. He has spoken at several national conferences and local events about Alfresco and AWS.