Explains the concept of Platform Engineering to help a company deliver quality software faster and how the AWS CDK can help in achieving this.

1. Platform Engineering 101
Faster quality software delivery with the AWS CDK
Skyworkz - https://skyworkz.nl
Sander Knape - https://sanderknape.com

2. Hello, I’m Sander Knape
Cloud Engineer @ Skyworkz
-> Enablement Lead @ Jumbo
Previously: Coolblue

3. Let’s build an app
● Application that connects to a database
● Works on my machine™
→ Let’s get it into production!

4. Cloud provider / runtime environment

5. Infrastructure as Code

6. CI / CD

7. Configuration management

8. ...

9. There’s quite a bit going on
Cloud provider / runtime
environment
Infrastructure as Code
CI / CD
Artifact management
Security scanning
Configuration
management
Secret management
Monitoring, Logging,
Metrics
Alerts
Database migrations
Database
anonymization
Cost insights
Security
Application
DNS / Routing

10. Software development is more than
just writing [Go, Java, NodeJS, C#, …]

11. You need a platform

12. Kubernetes isn’t enough

13. Definition time: “Platform Engineering”
The composition and integration of a set of tools, abstractions and automation
(components) to build a coherent platform with the goal of empowering
developers to be able to easily build, maintain and operate their business logic.

14. Cognitive load
“the used amount of working
memory resources to
complete a task”

15. There’s quite a bit going on
Cloud provider / runtime
environment
Infrastructure as Code
CI / CD
Artifact management
Security scanning
Configuration
management
Secret management
Monitoring, Logging,
Metrics
Alerts
Database migrations
Database
anonymization
Cost insights
Security
Application
DNS / Routing

16. Autonomy
requires
Ownership
You build it, you run it

17. How to make ownership
manageable?

18. Tooling, abstractions
and automation
(a platform)

19. Why is taking ownership hard?
“[T]he reality is that state of the art cloud native technology is still too hard to use if
every product engineering team has to individually solve common problems
around networking, observability, deployment, provisioning, caching, data storage,
etc.”
https://medium.com/@mattklein123/the-human-scalability-of-devops-e36c37d3db6a

20. A Virtual Private Cloud in AWS

21. Delivering quality software faster

22. Challenges I won’t talk about
1. Protect the platform for organizational scalability
2. Build an opinionated platform
3. Specify contracts

23. The new kid on the block

24. Provisioning Infrastructure in AWS

25. CloudFormation & Terraform
YAML (or JSON)
Hashicorp
Configuration
Language (HCL)

26. AWS CDK
Javascript, TypeScript, Python, Java,
.NET

27. AWS CDK generates CloudFormation

28. Bye bye glue

29. Invoke Lambda from S3
S3 Bucket Lambda
Function
Event Source
Execute
Permissions
CRUD
Permissions

30. Out of the box, least-privilege IAM permissions
const bucket = new s3.Bucket(this, 'bucket', {
name: 'my-aws-cdk-bucket' ,
});
const fn = new lambda.Function(this, 'rule', {
name: 'my-aws-cdk-function' ,
...
});
bucket.addEventNotification (
s3.EventType.OBJECT_CREATED , new s3.LambdaDestination (fn)
);

31. Same with Security Groups
const cluster = new EKS.Cluster(this, 'microservices-cluster' , {
version: '1.15',
...
});
autoscalingGroup .connections.allowFrom(cluster, Port.tcp(443));
autoscalingGroup .connections.allowFrom(cluster, Port.tcpRange(1024,
65535));

32. Hello abstractions

33. Constructs
Constructs are the basic building blocks of AWS CDK apps. A construct
represents a "cloud component" and encapsulates everything AWS
CloudFormation needs to create the component.
A construct can represent a single resource, such as an Amazon Simple
Storage Service (Amazon S3) bucket, or it can represent a higher-level
component consisting of multiple AWS CDK resources.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/constructs.html

34. Constructs
new SkyworkzRedis(...);
new SkyworkzDynamoDB (...);
new SkyworkzQueue(...);

35. Constructs
const dockerImages = [
'platform-terraform-deployment' ,
'platform-blazemeter-runner' ,
];
for (const dockerImage of dockerImages) {
new DockerBuildDeploymentConstruct (this, dockerImage, {
imageName: dockerImage,
account: this.account,
region: this.region,
});
}

36. Package managers
● NPM
● Maven
● Pip
● NuGet

37. Dependency management
Platform
Application
Application
Application

38. VPC’s in AWS

39. Sane defaults
new ec2.Vpc(this, 'vpc', {
cidr: '10.0.0.0/16',
});
// or...
new SkyworkzVpc(this, 'vpc',
{
cidr: '10.0.0.0/16',
});

40. What is sane?
https://github.com/aws/aws-cdk/pull/1850#issuecomment-479362793

41. Summarizing
● Achieve faster delivery of quality software through Platform Engineering
● Enable your developers to take ownership
● Build tooling, abstractions and automation

42. Thank you!
Questions?
Skyworkz - https://skyworkz.nl
Sander Knape - https://sanderknape.com - @SanderKnape