Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - AWS infrastructure as code: A year in review (DOP206)

Summary

• Speakers: Tatiana Cook (Principal Product Manager, AWS IaC team) and James Hood (Principal Engineer, AWS).
• Themes: Fundamentals of IaC, transformation in organizations, and the future of IaC.
• AWS IaC Portfolio: Includes AWS CloudFormation, AWS CDK, AWS SAM, AWS Copilot, AWS Application Composer, AWS Service Catalog, and AWS Amplify.
• Fundamentals: Emphasis on the resource provider layer, migration to a registry model, and ensuring backward compatibility.
• Transformation: Different operational models for IaC adoption, including centralized provisioning, platform-enabled golden paths, embedded DevOps, and decentralized DevOps.
• Future of IaC: Multimodal interaction with IaC, including visual, text-based, and natural language interfaces.
• New Features: CloudFormation template generation for existing resources, CDK Migrate command, Git synchronization for CloudFormation stacks, and CodeWhisperer support for IaC.
• Safety Features: CloudFormation hooks for proactive compliance and safety during deployments.
• Customer Stories: PGA Tour's use of AWS CDK for increased release velocity and deployment agility.
• Community Engagement: Encouragement to join the IaC Builder Slack community and contribute to public roadmaps.

Insights

• Resource Registry Model: AWS has shifted to a federated ownership model for IaC resource definitions, allowing service teams to iterate on their resources alongside feature launches. This model supports third-party IaC tools and ensures that AWS services have IaC support from day one.
• Backward Compatibility: AWS places a strong emphasis on ensuring that updates to the resource provider layer do not break existing customer deployments. This involves rigorous testing, including API parity testing and chaos engineering techniques.
• Operational Models for IaC: AWS recognizes that organizations have different models for adopting IaC, and they have launched features to support these various models. This includes new capabilities for centralized teams, platform teams, and developers who manage both infrastructure and application code.
• Generative AI in IaC: AWS is integrating generative AI into IaC authoring, which could significantly accelerate the development process and potentially change the way infrastructure is coded.
• Safety and Compliance: AWS is focusing on proactive safety features, such as CloudFormation hooks, to ensure that infrastructure deployments are compliant with organizational policies and best practices.
• Community and Feedback: AWS is actively seeking community engagement and feedback through various channels, including a new IaC Builder Slack community, public GitHub repositories, and live streaming series on YouTube. This indicates a commitment to open-source principles and community-driven development.