CDK project for deploying the infrastructure for a containerized application to AWS
AWS CDK projects require some bootstrapping before synthesis or deployment. Please review the bootstapping documentation before development.
The cdk.json file tells the CDK Toolkit how to execute your app.
This project is set up like a standard Python project. The initialization
process also creates a virtualenv within this project, stored under the .venv
directory. To create the virtualenv it assumes that there is a python3
(or python for Windows) executable in your path with access to the venv
package. If for any reason the automatic creation of the virtualenv fails,
you can create the virtualenv manually.
To manually create a virtualenv on MacOS and Linux:
$ python3 -m venv .venv
After the init process completes and the virtualenv is created, you can use the following step to activate your virtualenv.
$ source .venv/bin/activate
If you are a Windows platform, you would activate the virtualenv like this:
% .venv\Scripts\activate.bat
Once the virtualenv is activated, you can install the required dependencies.
$ pip install -r requirements.txt -r requirements-dev.txt
Install the cdk app
sudo npm install -g aws-cdk
At this point you can now synthesize the CloudFormation template for this code. An environment context is rquired, check cdk.json for available contexts.
$ cdk synth --context env=dev
As a pre-deployment step we syntatically validate the CDK json, yaml and python files with pre-commit.
Please install pre-commit, once installed the file validations will
automatically run on every commit. Alternatively you can manually
execute the validations by running pre-commit run --all-files.
Tests are available in the tests folder. Execute the following to run tests:
python -m pytest tests/ -s -v
We use the AWS Secrets Manager
to store secrets for this project. An AWS best practice is to create secrets
with a unique ID to prevent conflicts when multiple instances of this project
is deployed to the same AWS account. Our naming convention is
<cfn stack id>/<environment id>/<secret name>. An example is MyTestStack/dev/MySecret
Sage IT manages the creation of DNS records and TLS certificates in org-formation. The DNS records are managed centrally in the SageIT account, and corresponding wildcard TLS certificates are created in any application accounts that will deploy applications with custom (non-AWS) domains.
When deploying a new application (or an existing application to a new account,
e.g. the first deploy to "prod"), first check that a certificate for the
desired domain has been created in the account the application will be deployed
to (e.g. here for app.sagebionetworks.org).
If a certificate is needed in a new account, make a request to the IT team
because there is a manual validation step that must be performed by an
administrator. Set the value of ACM_CERT_ARN context variable to the ARN of
the certificate in the target account. If the AWS ARN for an existing
certificate is not known, it can be requested from Sage IT.
Finally, a DNS CNAME must be created in org-formation after the initial deployment of the application to make the application available at the desired URL. The CDK application exports the DNS name of the Application Load Balancer to be consumed in org-formation. An example PR setting up a CNAME.