CloudFormation Opinionated Make : "Cake"

There are many AWS CloudFormation DSLs, direct alternatives, and AWS orchestration and management framework. Cake is different. The approach accepts that AWS is constantly iterating on CloudFormation, adding new features and functionality regularly. We accept the premise that CloudFormation is the AWS native management solution, and strive to build as thin a layer as possible to make life easier without getting in the way.

Many tools make the simple easy, and hard impossible. We intend to keep the simple simple, and offer an approach that makes the hard understandable.

The core of Cake is just that... a make file. To be explicit, we actually leverage MMake for some helpful capabilities of imports from other sources. Allowing us to easily share dependencies across teams and projects.

What it DOES NOT do

Add "magic" layers on top of CloudFormation
Remove the need to be familiar with AWS or have a solid grasp CloudFormation
A self contained deployment utility (aws cloudformation stack is great on itself!)

What it DOES do

Offers a highly opinionated structure, but keep only what you want
Helps manage large templates in an elegant file structure
Offers simple pipelining transformation operations
Offers some libraries of pre-built transforms
Examples of packaging and deployment

Installing

Trick question! Cake is an opinionated structure, spec, and some modules. We rely entirely on MMake and yq (yaml command line query) and the aws cli and require no other dependencies. Your own "pieces" (module includes) may require deps, and it's own you to handle them. We want to stay as light weight as possible.

# OSX setup
# mmake: https://github.com/tj/mmake/releases (get binary for your system, drop it somewhere in your path /usr/local/bin/mmake for example)
# alias make="mmake"
# alias cake="mmake" if you like cake

brew install yq

Using

The quickest way to get started is to check some examples... In any cake enabled project you can always run cake help to see what is available to you, including all commands in recursively included pieces.

For example, the github.com/trek10inc/cake/pieces/basic/default.mk include, with cake help will show the following.

➜ cake help
  clean                removes any build and packaging artifacts
  compile              compiles the template by merging all .yml files
  deploy               Simple deploy or update (args: region=)
  deploy-all-regions   Quickly deploy to a list of regions defined in cake.yml
  pre-transform        pre-ransform pipeline
  validate             compiles and validates the template
  watch                watches all files, rebuilds, and validates on change

cake help -v will expose more verbose details.

Local Development

Clone the repository, the simplest thing to do to make dev easy, and compatible with mmake github includes, is to run the below command while in the root of the repository. mmake will not go fetch those files then, it will see the includes as already existing locally!

ln -s $PWD/pieces /usr/local/include/github.com/trek10inc/cake/

TODO

Default modules as includes
quick "install" script (install yq, mmake, cake init, etc) (good for CI?)
Testing harness against all examples