Blueprint 3.2.0 is out and comes with two new commands and two new arguments.

First, hot on the heels of our announcement that blueprints work directly with AWS CloudFormation, we've added --cfn to blueprint-create and blueprint-show to generate a complete CloudFormation template from a blueprint.  The template contains all the necessary pieces to create a single EC2 instance running Amazon Linux that'll apply your blueprint at provision time.  From there you can of course add more resources to build out a larger infrastructure with CloudFormation.

Next is the --diff=subtrahend argument to blueprint-create, making it easier to create compact blueprints.  Observe:

blueprint create --diff=base custom

is roughly equivalent to

blueprint create dummy
blueprint diff dummy base custom
blueprint destroy dummy

but doesn't actually save dummy to disk.  The practice of creating base system blueprints and compact customizations on top of that is gaining traction and now it's a whole lot easier.

Last are two commands, blueprint-split and blueprint-prune, that make creating modular blueprints (like a base blueprint and a customization) possible without crazy blueprintignore(5) incantations.  blueprint-split interactively creates two blueprints from the resources contained in one source blueprint.  blueprint-prune works much the same way but creates one blueprint from a subset of the resources in a source blueprint.

As always, the full details are on GitHub: https://github.com/devstructure/blueprint/compare/v3.1.0...v3.2.0

If you're not yet using Blueprint, the installation instructions in the README will get you started.

Just last week, Amazon Web Services rolled out the first production release of the Amazon Linux AMI and with it some powerful new features for CloudFormation.  There’s a lot there (like updating stacks and IAM integration) but we at DevStructure are most excited about Application Bootstrapping.

The new Amazon Linux AMI comes with the aws-cfn-bootstrap package, which can unpack tarballs, place configuration files, install packages, and restart services at provision time.  Sound familiar?  That’s right, this new section of the CloudFormation template language uses the blueprint(5) file format!

Amazon’s PDF whitepaper, Bootstrapping Applications via AWS CloudFormation, walks through building a complete stack template by hand.  To summarize, you’ll need to create an IAM resource and declare your EC2 instances like this:

"Resources": {
  "DemoInstance": {
    "Metadata": {
      "AWS::CloudFormation::Init": {
        "config": THIS IS WHERE THE BLUEPRINT GOES!
      }
    },
    "Properties": {
            "ImageId": {"Fn::FindInMap": [
              "AWSRegionArch2AMI",
              {"Ref": "AWS::Region"},
              {"Fn::FindInMap": [
                "AWSInstanceType2Arch",
                {"Ref": "InstanceType"},
                "Arch"
              ]}
            ]},
      "InstanceType": {"Ref": "InstanceType"},
      "KeyName": {"Ref": "KeyName"},
      "SecurityGroups": [{"Ref": "DemoSecurityGroup"}],
      "UserData" : {"Fn::Base64" : {"Fn::Join" : ["", [
        "#!/bin/sh\n",
        "/opt/aws/bin/cfn-init",
        " -s '", {"Ref" : "AWS::StackName"}, "'",
        " -r 'DemoInstance'",
        " --region '", { "Ref" : "AWS::Region" }, "'",
        " --access-key '", {"Ref": "DemoKey"}, "'",
        " --secret-key '", {"Fn::GetAtt": ["DemoKey", "SecretAccessKey"]}, "'",
        "\n",
        "/opt/aws/bin/cfn-signal",
        " -e $?",
        " '", {"Ref" : "DemoWaitConditionHandle"}, "'",
        "\n"
      ]]}}
    },
    "Type": "AWS::EC2::Instance"
  }
}

The user-data calls cfn-init with the newly-generated IAM credentials to fetch and process the metadata, and cfn-signal to report success or failure via a WaitCondition.

Packages managed by Yum, Python’s easy_install, and RubyGems plus files and services all work natively within CloudFormation.  Source tarballs will work if you upload them someplace and provide the fully-qualified URL.

Going the other direction, the metadata from an existing CloudFormation template can be loaded into Blueprint by copying out the "config" document fragment and passing it on standard input to blueprint-create(1).

Our thanks to the Reto Kramer, Chris Whitaker, and Adam Thomas for making it even easier to deploy blueprints to Amazon EC2.

Today, we’re releasing Blueprint 3.1, which includes a number of fixes and improvements but most importantly, understands all of Amazon’s extensions to the blueprint(5) format, allowing seamless transition to and from AWS CloudFormation.  Get 3.1 from GitHub, DevStructure’s Debian archive, or from PyPI.