Botoform

Architect infrastructure on AWS using YAML.

Botoform provides tools to manage the lifecycle of related AWS resources. We use a simple YAML schema to document resources and infrastructure. The YAML schema has self documenting qualities and works with version control.

In this example we use the bf create tool to build the infrastructure defined in helloworld.yaml:

The bf tools use the YAML architecture to create and manage environments. Botoform allows reproduction of any environment, no matter how complex.

Botoform abstracts and enriches the Boto3 and Botocore projects.

Documentation

The full documentation lives here: botoform.readthedocs.org

We use Sphinx to write and build the documentation.

Quickstart

The Quickstart Guide will teach you how to setup your aws credential config file and create and destroy a real test VPC using botoform.

helloworld.yaml

Here we show a small example of what botoform can do.

This will build a VPC, Internet Gateway, Route table, Subnet, Security Group, and a single EC2 instance.

vpc_cidr: {{ vpc_cidr }}

amis:
  ubuntu-14.04-lts-hvm:
    us-east-1: ami-fce3c696

route_tables:
  public:
    routes:
      - ['0.0.0.0/0', 'internet_gateway']

subnets:
  public-1: 
    size: 27
    route_table: public
    public: True

security_groups:
  bastion:
    inbound:
      - ['0.0.0.0/0', 'tcp',   22]

instance_roles:
  bastion:
    instance_type: t2.micro
    ami: 'ubuntu-14.04-lts-hvm'
    count: 1
    security_groups: ['bastion']
    subnets: ['public-1']
    eip: true
    block_devices:
      "/dev/sda1":
        size: 10

Schema Reference

The full YAML Schema Reference documentation is in progress.

For now please look here for examples:

https://github.com/russellballestrini/botoform/blob/master/tests/fixtures/webapp.yaml

You may optionally use Jinja2 in your YAML config.

Misc

What about CloudFormation?

I couldn't figure out how to use CloudFormation and I think that is a problem... Botoform will not support all the things that CloudFormation does, and at times it will be opinionated to keep things simple, usable, and understandable.

What about Terraform?

Terraform focuses on many different cloud providers, and uses hashicorp configuration language. Botoform will focus only on AWS, and uses YAML + Jinja2 configuration. Ideally Botoform will be easier to use and more feature/service complete then Terraform for AWS.