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AWS Infrastructure Composer

 A very brief look.

The text says;

  • Drag and drop any CloudFormation resource on a visual canvas
  • Connect and configure enhanced components to automatically build IaC for an application architecture
  • Seamlessly transition between authoring workflows visually with Step Functions Workflow Studio and defining resources with Infrastructure Composer
  • Integrate your browser with your project through “local sync” or use Composer in the AWS Toolkit for Visual Studio Code

Again, there was something similar to this in 2019, using a GUI to build infrastructure that would be converted to code. Nice to know they bought it back.


When you enter the Composer, it's a blank space with a light background with dots, very reminiscent to the screen for Cloud Formation. Infrastructure Objects are in a drawer to the left and you click and drag;

 You see I've selected a bucket; I can rename it.

I tried to connect a bucket to a Dynamo DB Table, because Buckets store data, but it's not available yet.



It also lost one of my buckets somewhere in the ether of the GUI. Ah well. It happens. Somehow I couldn't find the outright EC2 instance in the drawer with the options. But I knew how I could bring it up;

I opened a Cloud Formation file I made with an EC2 instance with SSH enabled, a security group, and an imitation Firewall (at the time, Firewalls were implemented but most people found policies to work just fine).

 

 And then I searched again and found it, and added a second Instance to my template.


 

Selecting the Template button does indeed show the code I created, with the ability to toggle between YAML and JSON. 

You'll notice in the image above that there are dots connecting the components.

 

 The just added instance does not have these dots, so I can't connect it to the Security Group.

 So I opened the details of the original instance MyEC2Instance and copied the information to the new Instance, which connected it.




I can work on seeing if I can integrate the Firewalls properly now.

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