Environmentbase extends troposphere, a library of wrapper objects for programmatically generating Cloudformation templates. Environmentbase embraces this model of automation development and extends it in several ways:

• provides a configurable base layer of networking resources enabling you to focus on services instead of networking
• provides a small but growing library of functional infrastructure patterns encapsulating industry best practices.
• provides an extension mechanism to develop your own configurable, reusable 'patterns' using child-templates.

Moreover the Environmentbase platform allows for a service oriented development model, whereby small teams can build, test and deploy independent infrastructure automation templates, each focused on a specific service or function. These templates can be imported and associated to a 'top-level' (integration) template to centrally deploy and manage the full environment. The same template can be deployed in any region or AWS account to produce identical environments.

Out of the box, this will create a VPC that should deploy cleanly into any region across the publicly available AWS regions. The VPC network, by default, will include:

• A public (/24) and a private subnet (/22) in three different Availability Zones
• A highly available NAT instance per AZ
• A bastion host
• An S3 bucket configured to allow Amazon ELB (within the same region) and AWS CloudTrail to aggregate logs

There are a number of configuration options documented within the script itself using docopt. An overview of the general capabilities and features is as follows:

• This script queries the AWS VPC API to ensure that the AZ's selected for deployment will allow subnets to be deployed to them (sometimes an issue in older accounts)
• Modify the base network CIDR block and subnet size and count via parameters
• Set prefixes for S3 key names for ELB and CloudTrail logging paths within the created bucket

Used from the command line, this will generate the network alone, but when used as a Python module, it's a powerful building block to help generate the basic structures for more complex environments in CloudFormation very easily.

The Python class EnvironmentBase is designed to be useful from command line tools, but has further utility as a base class for more complicated environments. The original aim of this script was to build a reusable artifact that could serve as the common networking design for multi-AZ, multi-subnet demo environments. As such, the environmentbase.py script contains a number of methods that are meant to be used by sub-classes and provide abstractions for common workflows and use cases. To use this class, simply add it as a dependency in your requirements.txt or setup.py. The import and class definition for your project will look similar to the following:

from environmentbase.networkbase import NetworkBase

class MyEnvClass(NetworkBase):
    '''
    Class creates a VPC and common network components for the environment
    '''

    def create_action(self):

        self.initialize_template()
        self.construct_network()

        # Do custom troposphere resource creation here

        self.write_template_to_file()


    def deploy_action(self):

        # Do custom deploy steps here

        super(MyEnvClass, self).deploy_action()


if __name__ == '__main__':

    MyEnvClass()

See the Development documentation for more detailed examples, including how to integrate the pre-packaged patterns

Documentation within the class takes a modified usage of the doxygen standard by adding a @classarg identifier that indicates that a given method utilizes an argument that's passed in via the class constructor along with the type and description of that parameter.

To use this script, you must install some requirements (listed here)

We recommend you create a virtual environment to isolate the dependencies from the rest of your system, but it is not required.
Run the following commands from the root of the environmentbase directory to install the dependencies:

python setup.py install

To use the script itself, you can run it directly from the command line:

environmentbase --help

You must have your AWS credentials configured as required by boto.

If you have the AWS CLI, you can run aws configure to generate the credentials files in the appropriate place. If you have already configured the AWS CLI, then no further steps are necessary.

You must ensure that the account you are authenticating with has at least the following permissions:

{"Statement": [ {"Action": ["ec2:DescribeAvailabilityZones",
"ec2:DescribeRegions"], "Effect": "Allow", "Resource": "*" }]}

This is required to perform the VPC lookups.

Once you have configured your credentials, you can run the generator as follows:

environmentbase init

This initialization command will generate two files: config.json and ami_cache.json. You may override the config filename with the --config-file parameter. This is useful when managing multiple stacks simultaneously.

You should now look at the generated config.json file and fill out at least the following fields:

template : ec2_key_default - SSH key used to log into your EC2 instances
template : template_bucket - S3 bucket used to upload the generated cloudformation templates

You may also edit the other fields to customize the environment to your liking. After you have configured your environment, run:

environmentbase create

This will generate the cloudformation templates using your updated config. Then run:

environmentbase deploy

This will create a cloudformation stack from your generated template on AWS

You may run the following command to delete your stack when you are done with it:

environmentbase delete

See File Descriptions for a detailed explanation on the various files generated and consumed by EnvironmentBase