Adam Divall

Walkthrough Guides and Other Useful Information on AWS

Launching into the Cloud with Confidence: The AWS Landing Zone Accelerator - Part 1

December 22, 2024 3 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

Migrating to the cloud can feel like a daunting leap. Where do you even begin? How do you ensure your cloud environment is secure, scalable, and compliant right from the start? Enter the AWS Landing Zone Accelerator (LZA), your trusty launchpad for a smooth and successful cloud journey.

What is the LZA?

The LZA is an open-source solution provided by AWS that helps you quickly build and deploy a well-architected multi-account AWS environment. Think of it as a blueprint for your cloud foundation, complete with pre-configured security controls, network configurations, and account structures.

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How to Set Up AWS CDK for Python

October 2, 2024 4 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

In this guide, I’ll walk through setting up AWS CDK with Python, including all the required dependencies and steps, and demonstrate how to deploy a simple app that provisions an Amazon S3 bucket.

What is the AWS CDK?

The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source software development framework designed to facilitate the creation and management of cloud infrastructure using familiar programming languages. Here are several important features and concepts associated with AWS CDK.:

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Configuring Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM)

March 19, 2023 5 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

In many enterprise environments a common challenge is to how to handle the allocation of IP CIDR blocks be that to Data Centers, Offices, Subnets so as to ensure that resources don’t end up with IP addresses that have already been assigned to resources on the Network. Duplicate IP Addresses on the Network can cause numerous issues and AWS have previously written the following blog that discusses several solutions to this challenge such as the use of NAT Gateways and AWS PrivateLink or a couple of more manual approaches to workaround the issue.

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Customising AWS Control Tower with Account Factory Customisations

December 30, 2022 6 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

At AWS re:Invent this year Account Factory Customisations was released. This post will walk you through how to configure and use the new functionality as in my opinion the documentation isn’t particularly clear as to how things work and there were also issues with the implementation steps when I first implemented it.

Use Case

For my specific situation that I’m utilising this for I want to deploy a VPC that leverages the Amazon VPC IP Address Manager (IPAM) for obtaining an IP CIDR Range since I don’t want to have to manually enter one each time and run the risk of overlapping address space. As part of my pre-requisties I’ve already written some automation using CloudFormation to not only setup VPC IPAM for delegated administration in my Organization, but I’ve also set up VPC IPAM so that I have seperate IPAM Pools for different regions and also different environments within those regions. This post won’t go into the details of the automation or the details of the CloudFormation Template that I’ll deploy either but how the Solution ultimately works.

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Creating a Multi-Account CI/CD Pipeline with AWS CodePipeline

October 18, 2022 16 min read Walkthroughs DevOps Adam Divall

Whenever I’ve tried to learn a particular service or functionality within AWS, I find the best way is to do the ClickOps approach (i.e. Good Old Point and Click in the Console). Once I’ve figured out how to get it working via that method, I then go through the process of trying to automate it through Infrastructure as Code and in my case thats using AWS CloudFormation.

One particular example of this was getting a bit more familiar with AWS CodePipeline so that I could try to automate the delivery of CloudFormation Templates across multiple AWS Accounts in a similar manner as to how you would deploy solutions in a Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC). When I was learning how to do this through the management console, I found out that its not possible to do it all within the console and therefore you have to also leverage the AWS CLI for specific parts.

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Customising AWS Control Tower with CfCT

September 22, 2022 9 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

If you missed the previous posts on Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower or you’ve not had much experience with the service, I’d recommend going back through and reading those firstly before continuing.

In this post, I’m going to walkthrough how you can start customising Control Tower using the Security Reference Architecture (SRA). The SRA utilises Customisations for Control Tower (CfCT) which deploys a DevOps pipeline that works with CloudFormation templates and Control Tower lifecycle events.

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Deploying a Landing Zone with AWS Control Tower - Part 3

September 6, 2022 6 min read Walkthroughs Adam Divall

Previously in Part 2 of this Walkthrough, I showed you how to create the organisational structure and enable guardrails within Control Tower.

In this post, I’m going to walkthrough some of the remaining post configuration task including configuring IAM Identity Center and provisioning a new AWS Account through Account Factory.

Configuring IAM Identity Center for Single Sign-On

AWS IAM Identity Center (formerly known as AWS SSO) is a service that enables you to have a single point of entry for managing resources within all of your AWS Accounts in an organisation.

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