Tagbase AWS CDK

Introduction

This project leverages the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) to facilitate the configuration, deployment, operation and maintenance of tagbase-server in AWS.

This project was born out of the need to implement cloud-based persistent storage for PostgreSQL data; essentially eTUFF data stored in TagbaseDB.

Without going any further, it will benefit you to learn about AWS CDK

The project is modularized such that you can develop, test, deploy and maintain individual subsystems independently. In AWS language, each module is referred to as a Stack. For example, the TagbaseDB Stack manages resources such as a PostgreSQL-backed AWS RDS deployment and associated resources such as a security groups, inbound and outbound rules, etc.

Prerequisites

• Python 3.6; or later including pip and virtualenv
• NodeJS; long term support (LTS)
• AWS CDK; follow the tutorial thoroughly... it will way off.

Configuration

Define the following global environment variables

• TAGBASE_AWS_ACCOUNT: The AWS account number to use for the deployment
• TAGBASE_DEFAULT_REGION: The target AWS region

High-level Guide

The cdk.json file tells the CDK Toolkit how to execute the 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

To deactivate the vurtualenv, do this:

% deactivate

Once the virtualenv is activated, you can install the required dependencies.

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Bootstrap the CDK deployment

% cdk bootstrap

At this point you can now synthesize the CloudFormation template for this code.

$ cdk synth

N.B. If you are warned about runtime issues due to your node version not being supported, then you should upgrade to a supported node version as indicated in the warnings.

To add additional dependencies, for example other CDK libraries, just add them to the setup.py file and rerun the pip install -r requirements.txt command.

Deploying

There are a few options for deploying.

Deploying the entire stack

This deploys both the VPC and PostgreSQL stacks.

% cdk deploy --all

Deploying the PostgreSQL DB into an existing VPC

Assumes that you already have a host VPC and wish to deploy the TagbaseDB stack into it.

% cdk deploy tagbase-db-stack

Useful commands

• cdk ls list all stacks in the app
• cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template
• cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region
• cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• cdk docs open CDK documentation

Enjoy!