Recently I had a contract which required me to immerse myself in AWS configuration for a LAMP stack, which led me to Terraform, amongst other things. I thought I’d publish here the list of resources that helped me. It’s a lot of links!

One tip I found was to use Jenkins to do automatic validation of your Terraform scripts. I think that’s a good tip.

Talk by Nicki Watt of Hashicorp: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgzgVm7Sqlk

Good tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVgP63BkhKQ

AWS

Cloud Best Practices: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/AWS_Cloud_Best_Practices.pdf

Elastic beanstalk might be a way to go: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/dg/concepts-webserver.html

These days I tend to put everything behind an Nginx reverse proxy: https://github.com/awslabs/ecs-nginx-reverse-proxy

Some AWS Webinars: https://aws.amazon.com/architecture/

Drupal. Which was quite close to what I’d be needing: https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/drupal/ and https://aws-quickstart.s3.amazonaws.com/quickstart-drupal/doc/drupal-on-the-aws-cloud.pdf and https://aws.amazon.com/quickstart/architecture/drupal/ and https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-refarch-drupal

Doing your Git stuff at Amazon appears to have some advantages. CodeCommit: https://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/

AWS cost Best Practices: https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/trustedadvisor/best-practices/

Web Hosting general best practices: https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws-web-hosting-best-practices.pdf

A reference architecture for Drupal hosting:

Akamai

If you’re on AWS it makes sense to use Amazon’s own CDN service. If however, you already have an Akamai account, it’s supported by terraform.

https://github.com/Comcast/terraform-provider-akamai

Terraform

Interestingly, Terraform works across multiple cloud providers.

An introduction from Gruntwork, a Terraform consultancy: https://blog.gruntwork.io/an-introduction-to-terraform-f17df9c6d180

Terraform with AWS: https://dzone.com/articles/terraform-with-aws

Terraform getting started: https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/terraform-getting-started

Hashicorp training: https://www.hashicorp.com/training

Udemy have courses if you want to pay money: https://www.udemy.com/learn-devops-infrastructure-automation-with-terraform/

Gruntwork comprehensive guide: https://blog.gruntwork.io/a-comprehensive-guide-to-terraform-b3d32832baca

Gruntwork slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/brikis98/comprehensive-terraform-training

Another tutorial: https://gist.github.com/p0bailey/3a34689f49b075ed058373dd73a7bce6

All about provisioners: https://www.terraform.io/docs/provisioners/index.html

Ansible

If Ansible is your configurator of choice, you can shoehorn it in to Terraform.

https://alex.dzyoba.com/blog/terraform-ansible/

https://github.com/express42/terraform-ansible-example/blob/master/ansible/terraform.py

https://github.com/radekg/terraform-provisioner-ansible

https://github.com/jonmorehouse/terraform-provisioner-ansible

Chef

Chef is natively supported.

https://sdbrett.com/BrettsITBlog/2017/08/using-the-chef-provisioner-with-terraform/

Chef and AWS: https://www.chef.io/implementations/aws/

Jenkins

Jenkins on AWS: https://d0.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/DevOps/Jenkins_on_AWS.pdf

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/simplify-your-jenkins-builds-with-aws-codebuild/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/set-up-a-build-pipeline-with-jenkins-and-amazon-ecs/

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/jenkins-on-aws/best-practices.html

https://wiki.jenkins.io/display/JENKINS/Jenkins+Best+Practices

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/aws-technical-content/latest/jenkins-on-aws/jenkins-on-aws.html

And there’s the link dump. It should be enough to keep you going for a couple of days! Overall, I think if you’re going to use AWS, embrace it fully. Except Cloudflare. They’re awesome.