Before following this section, please create an AWS account for yourself. You can sign up at https://aws.amazon.com. A basic understanding of AWS – for example, what a service is – will be beneficial to the understanding of this chapter.

A fundamental understanding of Python will help with the programming-based sections of this chapter. A basic understanding of IaC tools such as Terraform and the Linux command line will help you with following along in this chapter.

The commands in this chapter assume that you are using a Linux-based operating system. We will point out the Windows version where needed and possible.

You’ll also need the following software installed on your system:

• Python version 3.8 or later
• Node.js version 14.15.0 or later

Both of these version requirements are at the time of writing in May 2024. You can check the following links for the required versions:

• For Python: https://boto3.amazonaws...

AWS offers two ways of interacting with its services. One is the web interface, and the other is the API. The API is used by tools such as the AWS CLI or Terraform for programmatic interactions, while the web interface allows us to configure resources by clicking. Throughout this book, we’ll refer to the web interface (the AWS Management Console, which you can find at https://console.aws.amazon.com) as the AWS Console and will refer to the tool that you can use on the terminal as the AWS CLI.

The AWS CLI, Terraform, CloudFormation, and CDK all interact with the AWS services via the API and need to authenticate themselves against the API with an AWS access key and a secret access key.

For our initial setup, we’ll create an Identity and Access Management (IAM) user using the AWS Console. We can then use the access key ID and secret access key from our newly created IAM user to authenticate ourselves in the AWS CLI.

Important note

For...

In this section, we’ll be installing and setting up the AWS SDK for Python, called Boto3. Boto3 is a powerful abstraction that allows us to interact with the AWS APIs from our Python code. This allows us to write automation scripts for complex operations.

Installing Boto3

We can use the pip package manager to install the Python package. To do so, run the following command:

python3 -m pip install boto3

If you are using Windows as your operating system, you might have to use the following command instead:

python –m pip install boto3

Trivia

You might be wondering why this SDK is called boto and not something like aws-python-sdk. The library is named after a breed of dolphins (called boto) that are native to the Amazon River. The creator of the original boto library, Mitch Garnaat, wanted a name that was “short, unusual, and with at least some kind of connection to Amazon.” You can read more details –...

While we could use the previously introduced AWS CLI or custom scripts using Python and Boto3 to create our infrastructure – at scale – we would like a tool that takes care of things such as abstracting the AWS API and keeping track of the state (maybe we want to modify an existing resource instead of creating a new one). This is where an IaC tool such as CloudFormation comes into play.

CloudFormation allows us to declaratively define how we want our infrastructure to look (i.e., that we want an S3 bucket named marcel-this-is-my-test-bucket) instead of having to imperatively write a script that contains all the API actions needed to create an S3 bucket with that name.

CloudFormation templates are written in either YAML or JSON. Throughout this book, we’ll use the YAML version due to its brevity and readability.

With CloudFormation being a fundamental AWS service, we don’t need to install anything. It can be used with the...

With the CDK, we describe our infrastructure using constructs in a high-level programming language such as Python, Java, or TypeScript. This then gets compiled into CloudFormation templates for us.

Installing the AWS CDK

In order to use the CDK – regardless of which of the offered programming languages you want to use – you’ll need Node.js installed. We can then use the node package manager (npm) to install the latest version of the CDK.

The following command will install cdk as a global package:

npm install -g aws-cdk

You can check that cdk is installed properly by running the following command:

cdk version

Important note

Regardless of the fact that we’ll be using Python to describe our CDK project, we still need to have Node.js installed since the core of CDK is written in JavaScript.

At the time of writing (May 2024), the CDK supports the following programming languages:

• TypeScript
• JavaScript
...

Terraform is declarative. This means that we declare a resource (such as our S3 bucket) and Terraform then figures out the required API actions to create this resource. To describe the resources, Terraform uses its own language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or, optionally, JSON. We’ll be using HCL throughout this book as it offers a more concise way to write our Terraform code as well as additional abilities such as adding comments to our code.

Terraform uses providers (usually written in Go) to translate the resources and changes defined in your Terraform code into API calls to AWS. The benefit of Terraform is that there are providers not only for AWS but also for other hyperscalers such as Microsoft Azure and GCP, as well as other providers.

This means that you can use the same language (HCL) and the same technology (Terraform) to describe your resources in different cloud providers.

Installing Terraform

To install Terraform...

In this chapter, we installed and set up the required tools such as the AWS CLI, the boto3 SDK for Python, the AWS CDK, and Terraform. Using these tools, we wrote some simple scripts, templates, or programs to create infrastructure following the IaC paradigm. We will use these tools in the coming chapters to build our infrastructure.

In the next chapter, we’ll see how the IAM service works and how we can use it to tighten security.