Utoolity

Newly launched Compass Marketplace makes way for our AWS integrations

2024-05-01T16:32:00+02:00

Atlassian has just launched the Compass Marketplace - this is a milestone for the entire Atlassian community and, in particular, for us:

We are excited to announce that our two AWS integrations for Atlassian’s developer experience platform Compass can now be installed from the Atlassian Marketplace. The apps have already been available via the Compass in-app Marketplace for a while, and the Atlassian Marketplace listings make them even easier to discover and explore.

Speaking of, are you wondering why we are offering two AWS integrations? Glad you asked, here's what differentiates our Integrate with AWS and Develop with AWS app families:

Value proposition & differences

Integrate with AWS

Integrate with AWS is our general integration for all teams who use AWS with Atlassian products – link and track your AWS resources so that you can use deep links to resources and dashboards in the AWS Management Console right from your Atlassian based workflows. It operates primarily on the level of the AWS resource abstraction and supports almost every available AWS resource type. It's implemented atop the Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) concept and leverages AWS services that understand this as well, such as AWS Application Manager, AWS Config, and AWS Resource Explorer.

Develop with AWS

Develop with AWS is our specialized integration for teams with a 'You build it, you run it' mindset – connect your AWS DevOps toolchain to the Atlassian Open DevOps experience in Jira and Compass so that you can see build and deployment events and metrics from tools like AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodeCommit, and AWS CloudFormation right in Jira and Compass.

While closely related, their value proposition and technical complexity differ significantly. Not everyone uses the AWS DevOps toolchain, and the event-driven integration requires more compute resources, so separating this out allows us to offer Integrate with AWS at a lower price point.

The pricing

While our Compass apps are commercially supported offerings today, they will remain free until the Marketplace supports the well established Paid via Atlassian (PvA) licensing model for Compass apps, too. Atlassian’s Compass specific app pricing tiers have yet to be announced, but as an orientation, you can expect Develop with AWS (Compass) to be priced similar to its sibling app Develop with AWS (Jira), and Integrate with AWS (Compass) at a respectively lower price point.

Team '24 promotion

Celebrating the Compass Marketplace launch in context of Team '24, we are happy to offer a 25% discount on Develop with AWS (Jira). Please refer to our Team '24 promotion for details.

Looking ahead

We are currently on a journey to significantly upgrade the user experience thanks to the release of AWS Resource Explorer and a long overdue UI technology upgrade of the Atlassian Forge platform. You can already taste the modernized UI in various views, and we'll follow up with an in-app AWS resource browsing experience soon to ease connecting your resources with Jira and Compass.

We'd love to get your feedback! Contact our products team to let us know which AWS services and resource types would help with the management of your distributed architecture.

Introducing Develop with AWS for Jira

2023-08-02T16:32:00+02:00

We are excited to launch our next app for Atlassian's project and development management platform Jira Software.

You build it, you run it – integrate your AWS DevOps toolchain with the Atlassian Open DevOps experience in Jira Software and Compass. Meet Develop with AWS (Jira):

Develop with AWS allows you to track your AWS DevOps toolchain activity right within Jira Software. The initial release supports tracking of AWS CodePipeline as well as AWS CodeBuild and AWS CloudFormation action activity within the various Jira OpenDevOps experiences:

Track AWS deployment events within the Jira deployments view
Analyze AWS deployment events via Jira deployments insights
View AWS DevOps events via the Jira development and release issue panels
Automate Jira issues with linked AWS DevOps events via Jira Automation
Search issues with linked AWS DevOps events via Jira Query Language (JQL)

We plan to support more applicable AWS resource types and services down the road, most notably:

AWS CodeCommit (in the works)
AWS CodeDeploy (in the works)
AWS Step Functions (future)
AWS AppConfig (future)
AWS App Runner (future)
Amazon ECS (future)

We'd love to get your feedback! Contact our products team to let us know which AWS services and resource types you use to build and run your workloads.

Availability / Promotion

Develop with AWS (Jira) is available via the Atlassian Marketplace today – learn more and try it for free in Jira Software.

Celebrating our launch, we are happy to offer an early adopter promotion, providing a 50% discount for six months – help us shape the AWS DevOps toolchain integration with Jira Software!

Introducing Develop with AWS for Compass

2023-04-19T16:32:00+02:00

We are excited to launch our second app for Atlassian's new developer experience platform Compass.

You build it, you run it – integrate your AWS DevOps toolchain with the Atlassian Open DevOps experience in Jira Software and Compass. Meet Develop with AWS (Compass):

Develop with AWS allows you to track your AWS DevOps toolchain activity right within Compass. The initial release supports tracking of AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild activity within the Compass activity feed, and as component activity and metrics:

Link AWS DevOps tools to Compass components
Surface build and deployment events within the Compass component activity feed
Track build and deployment metrics within the Compass component overview

We'd like to support many more applicable AWS resource types and services down the road, most notably:

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CodeCommit
AWS CodeDeploy
AWS Step Functions
AWS AppConfig
AWS App Runner
Amazon ECS

We'd love to get your feedback! Contact our products team to let us know which AWS services and resource types would help with the management of your distributed architecture.

Develop with AWS is available via the Compass in-product Marketplace today – learn more and try it for free in Compass.

Introducing Integrate with AWS for Compass

2022-11-02T16:32:00+01:00

We are excited to launch our first app for Atlassian's new developer experience platform Compass for teams with a ‘You build it, you run it’ mindset.

Link and track your AWS resources – integrate Amazon Web Services with your DevOps workflows in Compass. Meet Integrate with AWS (Compass):

Integrate with AWS allows you to track your AWS resources right within Compass. The initial release supports import of AWS resources as Compass components, provides deep links to resources and dashboards in the AWS Management Console, and tracks resource health and compliance:

Import AWS resources as Compass components
Search AWS backed components via AWS metadata like account, region, and resource type
Follow contextual deep links to AWS resources and dashboards
Inspect AWS resource details and track resource health and compliance

We'd like to fully utilize all capabilities of the evolving Compass platform, and we are currently exploring how to enrich the integration with AWS events and metrics, for example:

Ingestion of AWS service events into the Compass activity stream - notable candidates are AWS Config configuration and compliance change events, AWS Tagging events, and of course CloudFormation deployment events for AWS resources associated with a Compass component
Ingestion of applicable AWS resource metrics, and ideally providing sensible default scorecards for AWS workloads like 'AWS compliance score' (AWS Config), 'AWS security score' (AWS Security Hub), 'AWS resiliency score' (AWS Resiliency Hub), and 'AWS well-architected score' (AWS Well-Architected Tool)

We'd love to get your feedback! Contact our products team to let us know which AWS integrations for Compass would simplify the management of your distributed architecture.

Integrate with AWS is available via the Compass in-product Marketplace today – learn more and try it for free in Compass.

AWS Step Functions Gains Integrations With Over 200 Additional Services

2021-11-30T16:32:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's functionless solution for rendering many utility-glue Lambda functions in serverless workflows superfluous:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that AWS Step Functions supports over 200 AWS services via an AWS SDK integration, thereby expanding the number of supported API actions from 46 to over 9,000. The new integration type can support most existing and future services and API actions going forward.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Step Functions Gains Integrations With Over 200 Additional Services.

Tasks for AWS 2.23

2021-11-04T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.23 – this release adds container image support for AWS Lambda functions, and it allows to deploy functions powered by the AWS Graviton2 processor.

You can now use the app to deploy Lambda functions packages as container images to unify your tooling and support dependencies up to 10 GB in size via the AWS Lambda Function task, and you can get a better price performance ratio by running suitable functions on the Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processor.

Highlights

Deploy AWS Lambda functions packaged as container images

You can now also deploy Lambda functions packaged as container images with the AWS Lambda Function task, which already enables you to deploy functions packaged as ZIP archives from S3. This helps if you’ve invested in container tooling for your development workflows or need to deploy workloads with deployment packages larger than 50 MB – refer to the introductory blog post for details:

To help you with that, you can now package and deploy Lambda functions as container images of up to 10 GB in size. In this way, you can also easily build and deploy larger workloads that rely on sizable dependencies, such as machine learning or data intensive workloads. Just like functions packaged as ZIP archives, functions deployed as container images benefit from the same operational simplicity, automatic scaling, high availability, and native integrations with many services.

Lambda container images have some unique characteristics – Refer to Optimizing Lambda functions packaged as container images to understand "how container images are packaged, as well as how the Lambda service retrieves, caches, deploys, and retires container images.

Deploy AWS Lambda functions powered by Graviton2 processors

You can now also use the the AWS Lambda Function task to deploy new and existing functions powered by the Arm-based AWS Graviton2 processors, which can yield significantly better price performance for suitable workloads – refer to the introductory blog post for details:

With this choice, you can save money in two ways. First, your functions run more efficiently due to the Graviton2 architecture. Second, you pay less for the time that they run. In fact, Lambda functions powered by Graviton2 are designed to deliver up to 19 percent better performance at 20 percent lower cost.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.23 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.22

2021-08-18T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.22 – this release adds full compatibility with Bamboo Data Center and adds an action to start synchronous AWS Step Functions Express workflow executions.

You can now use the app with non-clustered and clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites, and you can start Express workflows synchronously via the AWS Step Functions State Machine task.

Highlights

Integrate distributed workflows with the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action

You can now also trigger the new Synchronous Express Workflows with the AWS Step Functions State Machine task, which already enables you to create, update, start, stop, and delete AWS Step Functions state machines:

Use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments

You can now also use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites.

Upgrade task for private secret keys

Previously, the app stored private secret keys used for encrypting long-term AWS security credentials in the local home directory. This worked fine for non-clustered (single node) usage, and clustered usage has still been possible by manually performing the few steps required to migrate the keys to the new Bamboo Data Center shared home directory.

To remove these manual steps, an upgrade task now automatically migrates the private secret keys from the local home to the new Bamboo Data Center shared home directory – this should be a quick and seamless process, refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.15 Upgrade Notes for details.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.22 Release Notes.

Automation with AWS 1.10

2021-08-18T14:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.10 – this release adds full compatibility with Bamboo Data Center and adds an integration to start synchronous AWS Step Functions Express workflow executions.

You can now use the app with non-clustered and clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites, and you can run actions and evaluate conditions by starting synchronous Express workflow executions via the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action.

Highlights (Core)

Integrate distributed workflows with the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action

In addition to the asynchronous Start Step Functions Execution action, you can now also use the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action to process Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions and Jira Service Management automation rule executions remotely with AWS Step Functions:

Synchronous Express Workflows allow developers to quickly receive the workflow response without needing to poll additional services or build a custom solution. This is useful for high-volume microservice orchestration and fast compute tasks that communicate via HTTPS.

Evaluate remote conditions with the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action

You can now use the Start Synchronous Step Functions Execution action in applicable integrations to evaluate arbitrary remote conditions by returning a JSON result shape that adheres to the action response format schema:

{
    'result': false,
    'errorMessage': "Workflow transition blocked due to a prerequisite condition being false"
}

This allows you to call AWS services and third-party REST APIs to ensure that any prerequisites for your workflows are automatically checked right before dependent steps are initiated.

Supported integrations are the Jira Service Management Automate with AWS if condition, the Jira Automate with AWS workflow condition and Automate with AWS workflow validator, and the Bamboo Automate with AWS task.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments

You can now also use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites.

Upgrade task for private secret keys

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.10 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.15

2021-08-18T12:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.15 – this release adds full compatibility with Bamboo Data Center.

You can now use the app with non-clustered and clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments

You can now also use the app with clustered Bamboo Data Center deployments to gain the flexibility and administrative control to manage mission-critical Bamboo sites.

Upgrade task for private secret keys

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.15 Release Notes.

Amazon SNS Gains Message Archiving and Analytics via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose

2021-05-31T16:32:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's serverless solution for obsoleting custom code to "capture, transform, buffer, compress and upload data" en route to destinations:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that Amazon SNS supports Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose subscriptions to send messages to "data lakes, data stores, and analytics services [...] without writing custom code". The new event destination also simplifies the integration of third-party service providers.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon SNS Gains Message Archiving and Analytics via Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose.

Introducing Visualize with AWS for Jira and Confluence

2021-04-28T17:32:00+02:00

After winning an encouraging second place in the category 'Built with Forge' at Codegeist 2020, we are excited to launch our first Atlassian Cloud apps for Jira and Confluence just in time for Atlassian Team 2021.

Maintain and render declarative charts and diagrams as code alongside your Jira issues and Confluence content. Meet Visualize with AWS (Jira) and Visualize with AWS (Confluence):

Visualize with AWS allows you to use a variety of declarative chart and diagram rendering engines to visualize any kind of data. The initial releases provide a Jira issue panel and Confluence macro to render one or more visualizations like architecture diagrams, operational metrics, or business reports right in context with your workflows. Diagrams can be provided and edited inline, or referenced via URL for more complex or dynamically updating charts and diagrams.

Visualize with AWS is built on the shoulders of several popular open-source (OSS) visualization frameworks like Vega/Vega-lite, PlantUML, Mermaid, and Graphviz.

It is implemented atop Atlassian's new app development platform Forge and uses an API provided by a Serverless stack on AWS (Amazon Web Services) – this allows us to provide a secure and inexpensive solution that can be extended with additional rendering engines and custom data sources down the road so that you effectively gain a flexible image rendering pipeline for live data.

We want to evolve the apps towards a low-cost and zero lock-in "charts and diagrams as code" solution, allowing you to maintain your visualizations wherever you please and retain full ownership and control of your data.

Celebrating our launch for Team 2021, we are happy to offer an early bird promotion, providing free usage of the apps for six months – help shape the future of diagrams as code with us!

Visualize with AWS is available in the Atlassian Marketplace today – learn more and try it for free in Jira and Confluence.

AWS Step Functions Gains Synchronous Express Workflows

2021-01-31T16:32:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's serverless solution for orchestrating high-volume, short duration microservices behind Amazon API Gateway:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that AWS Step Functions supports synchronous Express workflows to "easily build web-based applications and orchestrate high-volume, short-duration microservices". Express workflows, a cost-effective, high-performance workflow type with a runtime of up to five minutes, can now be synchronously invoked from Amazon API Gateway or directly via the API.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Step Functions Gains Synchronous Express Workflows.

Automation with AWS 1.9

2020-11-30T16:16:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.9 – this release adds an action to get parameters from the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store to evaluate remote conditions and inject remote configuration data and secrets. It also adds an IAM role for EC2/ECS credentials provider and introduces namespace and scope handling for generated Bamboo variables.

You can now use the Get Systems Manager Parameter action to evaluate remote conditions so that you can control Jira Service Management automation rules via the Automate with AWS if condition, control Jira workflow transitions via the Automate with AWS workflow condition and Automate with AWS workflow validator, and fail or succeed Bamboo builds and deployments via the Automate with AWS task. You can also use this action to inject remote configuration data and secrets stored as secure parameters in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, or stored as secrets within AWS Secrets Manager. Further, you can now provide AWS security credentials via an IAM role for EC2/ECS when you run your Atlassian products on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, or AWS Fargate, and you can adjust the namespace and scope of generated Bamboo variables.

Highlights (Core)

Evaluate remote conditions with the Get Systems Manager Parameter action

You can now use the Get Systems Manager Parameter action in applicable integrations to evaluate arbitrary remote conditions by returning a JSON result shape that adheres to the action response format schema:

{
    'result': false,
    'errorMessage': "Workflow transition blocked due to a prerequisite condition being false"
}

This allows you to use an event-based architecture to decouple condition evaluation in AWS from condition evaluation in Atlassian to ensure that any prerequisites for your workflows are automatically checked right before dependent steps are initiated, thereby reducing cost and latency over using the Invoke Lambda Function action to synchronously call AWS services and third-party REST APIs at evaluation time.

Inject remote configuration data and secrets with the Get Systems Manager Parameter action

You can now use the Get Systems Manager Parameter action in applicable integrations to inject arbitrary remote configuration data and secrets via the Systems Manager Parameter Store:

Currently supported integrations are the Bamboo Automate with AWS task.

This allows you to maintain configuration data and regular secrets as (secure) parameters in the Systems Manager Parameter Store, and optionally maintain secrets in AWS Secrets Manager when you require more advanced secret lifecycle management.

Depending on your use case and security governance requirements, you can store secrets as Parameter Store parameters of type SecureString, or as actual Secrets Manager secrets as outlined in Referencing AWS Secrets Manager secrets from Parameter Store parameters. The following articles provide a comparison between the two services:

Provide AWS security credentials via an IAM role for EC2/ECS

You can now enable the IAM role for EC2/ECS credentials provider via a feature flag. If you have provisioned your Atlassian workloads on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, or AWS Fargate, you can now benefit from the convenience and flexibility of providing AWS security credentials via IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances and IAM roles for Amazon ECS tasks.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Adjust generated Bamboo variable namespace and scope

Similar to the Inject Bamboo variables task that has been included with Bamboo as of release 6.7, you can now specify the namespace and scope for Bamboo variables generated by the Automate with AWS task to enable more flexible build orchestration. You can now pass a variable between stages, pass a variable from a plan to a deployment project, and you can use multiple tasks within the same job without overriding variables from preceding tasks by adjusting the namespace. The task defaults to the preceding behavior with local scope and a custom.aws namespace so that this remains an opt-in choice for advanced use cases.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.9 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.21

2020-11-25T12:16:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.21 – this release adds an IAM role for EC2/ECS credentials provider and introduces namespace and scope handling for generated Bamboo variables.

You can now provide AWS security credentials via an IAM role for EC2/ECS when you run your Atlassian products on Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, or AWS Fargate, and you can adjust the namespace and scope of generated Bamboo variables.

Highlights

Provide AWS security credentials via an IAM role for EC2/ECS

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Adjust generated Bamboo variable namespace and scope

Similar to the Inject Bamboo variables task that has been included with Bamboo as of release 6.7, you can now specify the namespace and scope for Bamboo variables generated by all applicable AWS tasks to enable more flexible build orchestration. You can now pass a variable between stages, pass a variable from a plan to a deployment project, and you can use multiple tasks within the same job without overriding variables from preceding tasks by adjusting the namespace. The tasks default to the preceding behavior with local scope and a custom.aws namespace so that this remains an opt-in choice for advanced use cases.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.21 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.14

2020-11-18T08:16:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.14 – this release adds an IAM role for EC2/ECS credentials provider and introduces namespace and scope handling for generated Bamboo variables.

Highlights (Core)

Provide AWS security credentials via an IAM role for EC2/ECS

You can now enable the IAM role for EC2/ECS credentials provider via a feature flag. If you have provisioned your Atlassian workloads on Amazon EC2 (for example, via the Atlassian Data Center on AWS Quick Starts), Amazon ECS, or AWS Fargate, you can now benefit from the convenience and flexibility of providing AWS security credentials via IAM roles for Amazon EC2 instances and IAM roles for Amazon ECS tasks.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Adjust generated Bamboo variable namespace and scope

Similar to the Inject Bamboo variables task that has been included with Bamboo as of release 6.7, you can now specify the namespace and scope for Bamboo variables generated by the AWS Credentials Variables and Amazon ECR Credentials Variables tasks to enable more flexible build orchestration. You can now pass a variable between stages, pass a variable from a plan to a deployment project, and you can use multiple tasks within the same job without overriding variables from preceding tasks by adjusting the namespace. The tasks default to the preceding behavior with local scope and a custom.aws namespace so that this remains an opt-in choice for advanced use cases.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.14 Release Notes.

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Gains Delivery to HTTP Endpoints

2020-10-30T16:32:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's solution for integrating third-party destinations for Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose:

Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose recently gained support to deliver streaming data to generic HTTP endpoints. This also enables additional AWS services as destinations via Amazon API Gateway's service integration. The new capability is complemented with dedicated integrations of additional third-party service providers like Datadog, MongoDB, and New Relic.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon Kinesis Data Firehose Gains Delivery to HTTP Endpoints.

AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) Supports Step Functions State Machines

2020-08-31T16:32:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's approach to provision workflow orchestration as an integrated part of serverless applications:

The AWS Serverless Application Model (AWS SAM) recently gained support for AWS Step Functions state machines. The new AWS::Serverless::StateMachine resource type enables developers to define state machines within a SAM template or in a separate file so that they can provision workflow orchestration as an integrated part of serverless applications.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Serverless Application Model Supports Step Functions State Machines.

Automation with AWS 1.8

2020-06-30T16:16:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.8 – this release introduces remote conditions with AWS for Jira Service Desk automation, Jira workflow transitions, and Bamboo builds and deployments.

You can now use the Invoke Lambda Function action to evaluate remote conditions so that you can control Jira Service Desk automation rules via the Automate with AWS if condition, control Jira workflow transitions via the Automate with AWS workflow condition and Automate with AWS workflow validator, and fail or succeed Bamboo builds and deployments via the Automate with AWS task.

Highlights (Core)

Evaluate remote conditions with the Invoke Lambda Function action

You can now use the Invoke Lambda Function action in applicable integrations to evaluate arbitrary remote conditions by returning a JSON result shape that adheres to the action response format schema:

{
    'result': false,
    'errorMessage': "Deployment blocked due to service being in alarm state"
}

This allows you to call AWS services and third-party REST APIs to ensure that any prerequisites for your workflows are automatically checked right before dependent steps are initiated.

Highlights (Jira)

Evaluate remote conditions to control Jira Service Desk automation rules

You can now use the Automate with AWS if condition to conditionally run Jira Service Desk automation rules based on the response returned from the Invoke Lambda Function.

Evaluate remote conditions to control Jira workflow transitions

You can now use the Automate with AWS workflow condition and Automate with AWS workflow validator to control Jira workflow transitions based on the response returned from the Invoke Lambda Function.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Evaluate remote conditions to fail or succeed Bamboo builds and deployments

You can now check Evaluate as condition within the Automate with AWS task to conditionally fail or succeed Bamboo builds and deployments based on the response returned from the Invoke Lambda Function.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.8 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.20

2020-06-30T12:16:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.20 – this release adds a new task for AWS Lambda layers, and adds Elastic Beanstalk platform branches for Amazon Linux 2.

You can now use the AWS Lambda Layer task to publish shared dependencies, and you can run Elastic Beanstalk applications on Amazon Linux 2, including support for .NET Core on Linux.

Highlights

Use the new AWS Lambda Layer task to publish shared dependencies

You can now use the AWS Lambda Layer task to share additional code and content like libraries, a custom runtime, or other dependencies in the form of layers so that you can use libraries in your function without needing to include them in your deployment package:

Layers let you keep your deployment package small, which makes development easier. You can avoid errors that can occur when you install and package dependencies with your function code. [...] You can create layers, or use layers published by AWS and other AWS customers. Layers support resource-based policies for granting layer usage permissions to specific AWS accounts, AWS Organizations, or all accounts.

Run Elastic Beanstalk applications on Amazon Linux 2

AWS has been steadily rolling out Elastic Beanstalk support for Amazon Linux 2, which allows you to Run all your cloud and enterprise applications in a secure, stable, and high performance Linux environment:

Amazon Linux 2 is the next generation of Amazon Linux, a Linux server operating system from Amazon Web Services (AWS). It provides a secure, stable, and high performance execution environment to develop and run cloud and enterprise applications. With Amazon Linux 2, you get an application environment that offers long term support with access to the latest innovations in the Linux ecosystem. Amazon Linux 2 is provided at no additional charge.

This also includes the just released Elastic Beanstalk support for running .NET Core on Linux Platform:

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.20 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.13

2020-06-30T08:16:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.13 – this release adds a dialog for temporary AWS security credentials and provides an option to enable connector management by restricted administrators.

You can now use the AWS Security Credentials dialog to generate and copy temporary AWS security credentials on demand, and you can enable connector management by restricted administrators via a feature flag.

Highlights (Core)

Generate and copy temporary AWS security credentials on demand

You can now use the AWS Security Credentials dialog to generate temporary AWS security credentials on demand so that you can validate the IAM policy configuration, or provide the credentials to other tools and services for the configured duration. The dialog allows you to copy the credential elements as individual values, and it also provides code templates with applicable AWS CLI environment variables for Shell, PowerShell, and CMD usage, as well as a named profile fragment for the AWS credentials file.

Delegate connector management to restricted administrators

As a system administrator you can now enable connector management by restricted administrators via a feature flag. This is the first step in our journey to move AWS credentials management into user space while retaining tight administrative control where desired.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.13 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.19

2019-10-02T16:48:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.19 – this release adds a new action to label parameter versions in the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store and adds support for managed IAM policies.

You can now use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter task to label parameter versions managed by the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, and you can use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management.

Highlights

Label parameter versions with the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter task

You can now use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter task to label parameter versions managed by the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, which provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data, whether plain-text data such as database strings or secrets such as passwords.

Use managed policies to consolidate IAM policy management

You can now use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Optionally succeed S3 Object delete action for non existing buckets

Similar to the Don't fail if nothing to ... options for the delete/download/copy S3 Object actions, it is now possible to Don't fail for non existing bucket for the Amazon S3 Object task's delete action to ensure all preconditions for subsequent tasks are met.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.19 Release Notes.

Automation with AWS 1.7

2019-10-02T16:40:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.7 – this release rebrands the existing Put CloudWatch Events action to also support Amazon EventBridge to relay, match and route Atlassian workflow events to AWS where they can be processed by one or more target services and adds support for managed IAM policies.

You can now use the Put EventBridge/CloudWatch Events action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, Jira and Jira Service Desk, and you can use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Put EventBridge Events action to route Atlassian workflow events

You can now use the Put EventBridge/CloudWatch Events action action to relay Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions via Amazon EventBridge so that you can match events and route them to one or more target functions or streams. This allows you to decouple the capturing of events like Jira Service Desk approvals, Jira workflow transitions or Bamboo plan executions from the decision to trigger subsequent automation by one or more target services:

Amazon EventBridge is a serverless event bus that makes it easy to connect applications together using data from your own applications, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, and AWS services. [...] You can set up routing rules to determine where to send your data to build application architectures that react in real time to all of your data sources. EventBridge makes it easy to build event-driven applications because it takes care of event ingestion and delivery, security, authorization, and error handling for you.

Use managed policies to consolidate IAM policy management

You can now use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS, which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.7 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.12

2019-10-02T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.12 – this release adds support for managed IAM policies and adds an option to audit credentials usage via AWS CloudTrail.

You can now use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management, and you can use the SSO enabled audit link on a connector to click through to AWS CloudTrail and inspect the most recently used AWS API based on the underlying credentials.

Highlights (Core)

Use managed policies to consolidate IAM policy management

You can now use managed IAM policies in addition to (or replacing) the former inline IAM policies to consolidate IAM policy management.

Audit credentials usage via AWS CloudTrail

You can now use the SSO enabled audit link on a connector to click through to AWS CloudTrail and inspect the most recently used AWS API based on the underlying credentials.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.12 Release Notes.

AWS Step Functions Gains Callback Patterns to Resume Paused Workflows

2019-09-02T16:32:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's solution for purely event-driven serverless workflows with manual steps and third-party integrations:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that AWS Step Functions supports callback patterns to "automate workflows for applications with human activities and custom integrations with third-party services". Workflow executions can now be paused until applications return a token via the Step Functions API, which obsoletes the previously required polling or other workarounds.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Step Functions Gains Callback Patterns to Resume Paused Workflows.

Tasks for AWS 2.18

2019-05-27T16:48:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.18 – this release adds a new task for AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Automation, adds support for advanced parameters in the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, adds an AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer, integrates GPU support and enhanced container dependency management for Amazon ECS containers, and adds support for the Node.js 10.x runtime in AWS Lambda.

You can now safely automate common and repetitive IT operations and management tasks across AWS resources via the AWS Systems Manager Automation Execution task, opt into using advanced parameters with the Systems Manager Parameter task, use the AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer to click through to commits and diffs in the CodeCommit console, configure GPU support and container dependencies in the Amazon ECS Task Definition task, and use the Node.js v10 runtime in the AWS Lambda Function task.

Highlights

Use the new AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Automation Execution task to manage AWS resources

You can now use the AWS Systems Manager Automation Execution task to start, signal, and stop an automation execution with AWS Systems Manager Automation, which simplifies common maintenance and deployment tasks of Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS resources. This enables you to:

Build Automation workflows to configure and manage instances and AWS resources.

Create custom workflows or use pre-defined workflows maintained by AWS.

Receive notifications about Automation tasks and workflows by using Amazon CloudWatch Events.

Monitor Automation progress and execution details by using the Amazon EC2 or the AWS Systems Manager console.

Opt into advanced parameters with the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter task

You can now opt into advanced parameters via the Systems Manager Parameter task to enable you to create more than 10,000 parameters, use larger parameter value size (up to 8 KB) and add policies to your parameter:

The larger parameter value size enables you to store parameters with long values such as certificates with long key chains. Advanced parameters also enable you to configure policies such as expiration, expiration notification and no-change notification. Expiration policy provides the ability to specify an expiration date and time. Expiration notification policy helps you track parameters that will expire soon. No-change notification policy helps you track parameters that have not changed for a specified period of time. Advanced parameters are priced per parameter per month, and per API interaction. See the pricing page for details.

Use the AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer

You can now use the AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer in Bamboo to click through with optional single sign-on (SSO) to commits and diffs in the AWS CodeCommit console from your builds and deployments.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo), which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Configure GPU support and dependencies for Amazon ECS containers

You can now use the Amazon ECS Task Definition task to designate a number of GPUs to assign to particular containers and define dependencies for container startup and shutdown as well as a per-container start and stop timeout value – refer to the resp. documentation for details:

Use the Node.js 10.x runtime for AWS Lambda functions

You can now use the Node.js 10.x runtime in the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. introductory post for details:

AWS Lambda adds support for Node.js v10

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.18 Release Notes.

Automation with AWS 1.6

2019-05-27T16:40:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.6 – this release adds a new action for AWS Systems Manager Automation to manage AWS resources from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions.

You can now use the Start Systems Manager Automation Execution action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, Jira, and Jira Service Desk.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Start Systems Manager (SSM) Automation Execution action to manage AWS resources

You can now use the Start Systems Manager Automation Execution action from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions to simplify common maintenance and deployment tasks of Amazon EC2 instances and other AWS resources via AWS Systems Manager Automation. This enables you to:

Build Automation workflows to configure and manage instances and AWS resources.

Create custom workflows or use pre-defined workflows maintained by AWS.

Receive notifications about Automation tasks and workflows by using Amazon CloudWatch Events.

Monitor Automation progress and execution details by using the Amazon EC2 or the AWS Systems Manager console.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Use the AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo), which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Highlights (Jira)

Create deep links to the AWS Management Console with the AWS Resource issue link type

You can now use the AWS Resource link remote issue link type in Jira to create deep links with optional single sign-on (SSO) to AWS resources in the AWS Management Console.

This feature is provided by Identity Federation for AWS (Jira), which is bundled and free for Automation with AWS licensees, see the resp. FAQ for details.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.6 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.11

2019-05-27T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.11 – this release adds a single sign-on (SSO) enabled Bamboo web repository viewer for AWS CodeCommit, and adds an SSO enabled Jira remote issue link type for AWS resources in the AWS Management Console.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Use the AWS CodeCommit web repository viewer

Highlights (Jira)

Create deep links to the AWS Management Console with the AWS Resource issue link type

You can now use the AWS Resource link remote issue link type in Jira to create deep links with optional single sign-on (SSO) to AWS resources in the AWS Management Console.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.11 Release Notes.

Automation with AWS 1.5

2019-02-26T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.5 – this release adds a new action for the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to relay event data from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions via AWS so that they can be processed by other services.

You can now use the Send SQS Message action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, Jira, and Jira Service Desk.

This release also addresses a breaking API/SPI change within Jira Service Desk 4 by providing separate artifacts for Jira 7.x and Jira 8.x compatibility.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Send SQS Message action to relay event data

You can now use the Send SQS Message to relay event data from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions via the Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for use in subsequent automation workflows. This allows you to decouple the capturing of event data from Jira Service Desk request approvals, Jira issue edits or Bamboo plan executions from the processing by other services:

SQS eliminates the complexity and overhead associated with managing and operating message oriented middleware, and empowers developers to focus on differentiating work. Using SQS, you can send, store, and receive messages between software components at any volume, without losing messages or requiring other services to be available. [...]

Highlights (Jira)

Automate your workflows in Jira 8 and Jira Service Desk 4

Most of the time we are able to retain Atlassian host product compatibility across major versions ('platform' versions in Atlassian lingo), but sometimes there are breaking changes that prevent that. While the Automate with AWS post function continued to work just fine in Jira 8, the Jira Service Desk 4 SPI changes required us to adjust the Automate with AWS then action in a backwards incompatible way. This release addresses the problem by providing separate artifacts for Jira 7.x and Jira 8.x compatibility.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.5 Release Notes.

AWS Identity and Access Management Gains Tags and Attribute-Based Access Control

2019-02-08T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's new offerings for IAM governance with tags and attribute-based access control:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently enabled tags for IAM users and roles to ease the management of IAM resources. Notably, this release also includes the ability to embrace attribute-based access control (ABAC) and match AWS resources with IAM principals dynamically to "simplify permissions management at scale".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Identity and Access Management Gains Tags and Attribute-Based Access Control.

Tasks for AWS 2.17

2018-11-28T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.17 – this release adds support for using AWS CloudFormation Macros with nested stacks, adds support for tagging ECS resources and injecting sensitive data from the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store or the AWS Secrets Manager into Amazon ECS containers, and adds support for the Python 3.7 runtime and 15 minutes execution time in AWS Lambda.

You can now forego change sets and use macros directly with the Create Stack and Update Stack actions in the AWS CloudFormation Stack task to enable usage with nested stacks, tag your ECS resources via all supported Amazon ECS tasks, inject parameters and secrets into Amazon ECS containers with the Amazon ECS Task Definition task, and use the Python 3.7 runtime and the extended 15 minutes execution time in the AWS Lambda Function task.

Highlights

Use AWS CloudFormation macros with nested stacks

You can now use AWS CloudFormation Macros directly in the Create Stack and Update Stack actions in the AWS CloudFormation Stack task to forego the previously required creation and execution of a change set and thereby enable macro usage with nested stacks. This is enabled by a new capability CAPABILITY_AUTO_EXPAND – refer to the documentation of the CreateStack API action for details:

Some templates contain macros. Macros perform custom processing on templates; this can include simple actions like find-and-replace operations, all the way to extensive transformations of entire templates. Because of this, users typically create a change set from the processed template, so that they can review the changes resulting from the macros before actually creating the stack. If your stack template contains one or more macros, and you choose to create a stack directly from the processed template, without first reviewing the resulting changes in a change set, you must acknowledge this capability. This includes the AWS::Include and AWS::Serverless transforms, which are macros hosted by AWS CloudFormation.

Change sets do not currently support nested stacks. If you want to create a stack from a stack template that contains macros and nested stacks, you must create the stack directly from the template using this capability.

Tag Amazon ECS resources

You can now tag your Amazon ECS resources via all supported Amazon ECS tasks:

Tags enable you to categorize your AWS resources in different ways, for example, by purpose, owner, or environment. This is useful when you have many resources of the same type – you can quickly identify a specific resource based on the tags you've assigned to it. For example, you could define a set of tags for your account's Amazon ECS container instances which helps you track each container instance's owner and stack level.

Inject SSM parameters and secrets into Amazon ECS containers

You can now use the Amazon ECS Task Definition task to inject sensitive data into your containers by storing your sensitive data in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store parameters and then referencing them in your container definition – refer to Specifying Sensitive Data for details:

As customers build applications, they need to reference sensitive information such as database credentials, tokens, configuration variables or SSH keys. Previously, customers had to directly reference this sensitive information in the task definition or manage your own run-time secrets with custom solutions to decouple secrets from core application logic stored in container images.

Now, you have new task definition conventions for exposing sensitive information stored in AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store to container instances. [...]

Use AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store with Bamboo

You can also use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store directly within Bamboo build plans and deployment projects via the dedicated AWS Systems Manager Parameter task.

Integration with AWS Secrets Manager

Besides natively supporting encrypted Secure String Parameters, the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store is also integrated with the dedicated AWS Secrets Manager – refer to Referencing AWS Secrets Manager Secrets from Parameter Store Parameters for details.

Use the Python 3.7 runtime and 15 minutes execution time for AWS Lambda functions

You can now use the Python 3.7 runtime and the extended 15 minutes execution time in the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. introductory posts for details:

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.17 Release Notes.

Amazon S3 Increases Request Rate Performance and Drops Randomized Prefix Requirement

2018-10-11T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's significant simplification of working with Amazon S3 at scale:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced significantly increased S3 request rate performance and the ability to parallelize requests to scale to the desired throughput. Notably this performance increase also "removes any previous guidance to randomize object prefixes" and enables the use of "logical or sequential naming patterns in S3 object naming without any performance implications".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon S3 Increases Request Rate Performance and Drops Randomized Prefix Requirement.

Tasks for AWS 2.16

2018-09-12T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.16 – this release adds a new task for the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store, adds an action to update AWS Step Functions state machines, adds support for the Amazon SQS event source in AWS Lambda, and adds support for Docker volumes and private registry authentication in Amazon ECS. You can now store and query secrets and configuration data remotely via the AWS Systems Manager Parameter task, update state machines via the AWS Step Functions State Machine task, use an SQS queue as event source within the AWS Lambda Event Source Mapping task, and use Docker volumes and private registries in the Amazon ECS Task Definition task.

Highlights

Use the new AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter task to manage secrets and configuration data

You can now use the AWS Systems Manager Parameter task to get, put, and delete a parameter managed by the AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store, which provides a centralized store to manage your configuration data, whether plain-text data such as database strings or secrets such as passwords:

This allows you to separate your secrets and configuration data from your code. Parameters can be tagged and organized into hierarchies, helping you manage parameters more easily. For example, you can use the same parameter name, "db-string", with a different hierarchical path, "dev/db-string” or “prod/db-string", to store different values. Systems Manager is integrated with AWS Key Management Service (KMS), allowing you to automatically encrypt the data you store. You can also control user and resource access to parameters using AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM). Parameters can be referenced through other AWS services, such as Amazon Elastic Container Service, AWS Lambda, and AWS CloudFormation.

Update AWS Step Functions state machines

You can now also update state machines with the AWS Step Functions State Machine task, which already enables you to create, start, stop, and delete AWS Step Functions state machines:

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application.

Use Amazon SQS as AWS Lambda event source

You can now use Amazon SQS as an event source with the AWS Lambda Event Source Mapping task – refer to the resp. introductory blog post for more details:

AWS Lambda Adds Amazon Simple Queue Service to Supported Event Sources

We can now use Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) to trigger AWS Lambda functions! This is a stellar update with some key functionality that I’ve personally been looking forward to for more than 4 years. I know our customers are excited to take it for a spin so feel free to skip to the walk through section below if you don’t want a trip down memory lane. [...]

Use Docker volumes and private registry authentication with Amazon ECS

You can now use Docker volumes and private registry authentication in the Amazon ECS Task Definition task.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.16 Release Notes.

Automation with AWS 1.4

2018-09-10T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.4 – this release adds a new action for the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store to persist event data from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions to AWS where they can be either queried or trigger notifications and actions via Amazon CloudWatch Events in turn.

You can now use the Put Systems Manager Parameter action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, Jira, and Jira Service Desk.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Put Systems Manager Parameter action to persist event data

You can now use the Put Systems Manager Parameter action to persist event data from Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions, and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions into the AWS Systems Manager (SSM) Parameter Store for use in subsequent automation workflows. This allows you to decouple the capturing of secrets and configuration data from Jira Service Desk request approvals, Jira issue edits or Bamboo plan executions from the decision to trigger subsequent automation by one or more target services:

AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store provides secure, hierarchical storage for configuration data management and secrets management. You can store data such as passwords, database strings, and license codes as parameter values. You can store values as plain text or encrypted data. You can then reference values by using the unique name that you specified when you created the parameter. [...] Parameter Store is offered at no additional charge.

Use CloudWatch Events to trigger notifications and actions for parameter updates

Using this action can in turn trigger notifications and actions via all other services that are supported targets in CloudWatch Events (this is an alternative to using the Put CloudWatch Events action directly).

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.4 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.10

2018-08-31T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.10 – this release adds an updated REST API version 2.1 that allows to manage credentials and connectors, is available as a Data Center approved app, and increases performance for users with large connector pools.

Highlights

Manage credentials and connectors via the REST API

The REST API has gained an updated minor version 2.1 to also support DELETE|POST|PUT methods for accounts (access keys) and connectors so that administrators can automate the provisioning and management of credentials and connectors (for example, to rotate AWS access keys) – refer to the Developer Guide for details.

Provision Identity Federation for AWS as a Data Center approved app

The Utoolity team is proud that the entire Identity Federation for AWS app family has qualified for the Data Center approved apps launch at Summit Europe 2018. This achievement was made possible by a significant engineering effort that also benefits our Server customers because applicable performance and scalability improvements within the shared code base will be available for both deployment options right away. We will follow suit striving for official approval of our Automation with AWS app family over the coming months (all our apps have been Data Center compatible from the get-go, but the Data Center approval program ensures that all apps are formally vetted against agreed upon quality standards within the ecosystem).

Gain increased performance with large connector pools

As part of the work to qualify for the Data Center approved apps launch we have been able to significantly increase the performance of deployments with large connector pools.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.10 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.9

2018-08-25T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.9 – this release adds support for Bitbucket, and allows to disable the implicit connector visibility for administrators (experimental).

Highlights

Use Identity Federation for AWS in Bitbucket

You can now use Identity Federation for AWS in Bitbucket to gain the following benefits:

Federated AWS access for Atlassian users – Add long-term AWS security credentials (IAM users) once, configure AWS access for Atlassian groups and Bitbucket add-ons with temporary credentials and fine grained permissions via IAM Policies thereafter (Identity Broker)
Single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console – Grant your team SSO access to AWS accounts via the [AWS Management Console Login menu](https://utoolity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IFAWS/pages/107806733/Using+the+AWS+Management+Console+Login+menu
REST API for temporary AWS security credentials – GET temporary AWS security credentials for Bitbucket apps via the REST API (Token Vendor)

Disable implicit connector visibility for administrators (experimental)

You can now disable the implicit connector visibility for administrators via a labs feature flag:

By default, administrators can always edit, see and use all connectors, whereas visibility and usage of connectors in the 'AWS Resources' menu, the connector selection widget, and via the REST API is scoped to the selected groups for all non administrators to allow the delegation of temporary AWS credentials retrieval.

While this behavior properly reflects the security barriers in the Atlassian Server universe (where administrators are generally able to get access to all data one way or another), it turns out to be a usability flaw for scenarios where many users have been granted administrative rights to overcome insufficient permission granularity in the host product (e.g. Bamboo before the permission changes introduced in release 6.2) - as a preliminary workaround, this feature flag allows to change the default behavior.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.9 Release Notes.

AWS Config Gains Cross-Account, Cross-Region Data Aggregation

2018-06-30T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to simplify centralized compliance auditing of AWS resources across multiple accounts:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added the capability to aggregate compliance data produced by AWS Config rules across multiple accounts and/or regions to enable centralized auditing and governance of AWS resources. A new aggregated dashboard view displays non-compliant rules across the organization. Users can then drill down to view details about resources that are violating any rules.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Config Gains Cross-Account, Cross-Region Data Aggregation.

AWS Open Sources and Expands Serverless Application Model (SAM) Implementation

2018-04-30T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to accelerate the evolution of CloudFormation's built-in serverless support:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently open sourced its Serverless Application Model (SAM) implementation and added a new event source for CloudWatch Logs subscription filters. The preceding release featured a comprehensive expansion of options to configure and deploy REST APIs via Amazon API Gateway, including support for CORS headers, regional endpoints, and binary media types.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Open Sources and Expands Serverless Application Model (SAM) Implementation.

Automation with AWS 1.3

2018-04-24T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.3 – this release adds a new action for Amazon CloudWatch Events to relay, match and route Atlassian workflow events to AWS where they can be processed by one or more target services, and adds plan, result and deployment entity variables to ease Bamboo notification payload composition. You can now use the Put CloudWatch Events action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, Jira and Jira Service Desk, and you can inject additional entity variables into Bamboo notification payloads.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Put CloudWatch Events action

You can now use the Put CloudWatch Events action to relay Bamboo notifications, Jira workflow transitions and Jira Service Desk automation rule executions via Amazon CloudWatch Events so that you can match events and route them to one or more target functions or streams. This allows you to decouple the capturing of events like Jira Service Desk approvals, Jira workflow transitions or Bamboo plan executions from the decision to trigger subsequent automation by one or more target services:

Amazon CloudWatch Events delivers a near real-time stream of system events [...]. Using simple rules that you can quickly set up, you can match events and route them to one or more target functions or streams. CloudWatch Events becomes aware of operational changes as they occur. CloudWatch Events responds to these operational changes and takes corrective action as necessary, by sending messages to respond to the environment, activating functions, making changes, and capturing state information.

Specify the target region for actions

So far, we have deduced the AWS region from the payload content (e.g. an SNS topic ARN), falling back to the AWS SDK default region in case this was not possible. This turned out to be a bit inflexible for services that do not require or support a region specification in a target resource, for example the as of today single regional event bus for CloudWatch Events, or the regional SMS offering for Amazon SNS. We have opted to introduce the well-established region selection widget to address these scenarios and cover possible mismatches via validations instead.

Implicit upgrade of persisted actions

All existing actions continue to run as configured and will usually default the widget with that configured region when you open the configuration dialog for the first time after updating to this release.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Use plan, result and deployment entity variables in Bamboo notification recipient

You can now use dedicated contextual entity variables for the Plan, the ResultSummary, and the DeploymentResult within the Automate with AWS notification recipient to compose the payload when running remote actions with AWS from Bamboo notifications, specifically from plan level and system level notifications. Previously, you only had access to Bamboo's pre-formatted Notification entity, requiring you to parse values like the build number from text messages. It is now much easier to pass exactly the desired data to your remote actions, which can then easily compose custom messages in any conceivable target format with custom code or based on your favorite template engine.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.3 Release Notes.

AWS Makes Serverless Application Repository Generally Available

2018-02-28T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to establish a discovery and distribution platform for serverless solutions:

After a brief preview period since re:Invent 2017, Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently made its new Serverless Application Repository generally available. Users can now discover, configure, and deploy serverless applications and components via the AWS Lambda console, which AWS considers an "ideal venue for AWS partners, enterprise customers, and independent developers to share their serverless creations".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Makes Serverless Application Repository Generally Available.

Real-Time Insights on AWS Account Activity

2018-02-22T16:32:00+01:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How do I monitor my AWS account activity in real-time?:

Monitoring Amazon Web Services (AWS) account activity can provide valuable insight into who is accessing your resources and how your resources are being used. This insight can help you make better-informed decisions that increase security and efficiency, facilitate compliance auditing, and optimize costs. Many customers choose to build custom account monitoring solutions using AWS services because these services provide an efficient way to handle a large number of activity events in real-time and the flexibility to get specific metrics.

To help you more easily monitor account activity, AWS offers the Real-Time Insights on AWS Account Activity solution, a reference implementation that automatically provisions and configures the services necessary to record and visualize resource access and usage metrics for your AWS account(s) in real-time. This solution is designed to provide a framework for visualizing access and usage metrics, allowing you to focus on adding new metrics rather than underlying infrastructure operations.

[...]

AWS Instance Scheduler

2018-02-08T16:32:00+01:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How do I automatically start and stop my Amazon EC2 and Amazon RDS instances?:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers infrastructure on demand so that customers can control their resource capacity and pay only for what they consume. One simple method to reduce costs is to stop resources that are not in use, and then start those resources again when their capacity is needed.

The AWS Instance Scheduler is a simple AWS-provided solution that enables customers to easily configure custom start and stop schedules for their Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances. The solution is easy to deploy and can help reduce operational costs for both development and production environments. Customers who use this solution to run instances during regular business hours can save up to 70% compared to running those instances 24 hours a day.

[...]

AWS Streamlines Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing Model and Operational Complexity

2018-01-31T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to ease usage of and widen applicable use cases for its low-cost EC2 compute capacity pool:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently introduced significant changes on how to request and operate Amazon EC2 spot instances, which can provide considerable cost savings. Users can now request spot instances without specifying a bidding price, spot prices are adjusted more gradually, and spot instances can also be stopped or hibernated and later resumed to further optimize interruptible workloads.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Streamlines Amazon EC2 Spot Instance Pricing Model and Operational Complexity.

Tasks for AWS 2.15

2018-01-30T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.15 – this release catches up on several serverless announcements from 'AWS re:Invent 2017': It adds support for the AWS Fargate launch type in Amazon ECS, and adds support for traffic shifting, concurrency limits, and the C# .NET Core 2.0 and Go 1.x runtimes in AWS Lambda. You can now run your Docker containers as an Amazon ECS Task or Amazon ECS Service without managing servers and clusters, and exercise more control over the deployment and concurrent execution of an AWS Lambda Function, which can now also use the C# .NET Core 2.0 and Go 1.x runtimes.

Highlights

Use AWS Fargate to run Docker containers on Amazon ECS without managing infrastructure

You can now use the AWS Fargate launch type to run Docker containers with the Amazon ECS Task task or the Amazon ECS Service task without managing servers or clusters – refer to the resp. introductory blog posts for more details:

Introducing AWS Fargate – Run Containers without Managing Infrastructure

AWS Fargate is an easy way to deploy your containers on AWS. To put it simply, Fargate is like EC2, but instead of giving you a virtual machine you get a container. It’s a technology that allows you to use containers as a fundamental compute primitive without having to manage the underlying instances. All you need to do is build your container image, specify the CPU and memory requirements, define your networking and IAM policies, and launch. With Fargate, you have flexible configuration options to closely match your application needs and you’re billed with per-second granularity. [...] * AWS Fargate: A Product Overview

Perform gradual deployments of AWS Lambda functions

You can now gradually deploy your Lambda function by shifting traffic between two function versions with the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. introductory blog post for more details:

Implementing Canary Deployments of AWS Lambda Functions with Alias Traffic Shifting

Before the release of traffic shifting for Lambda aliases, deployments of a Lambda function could only be performed in a single “flip” by updating function code for version $LATEST, or by updating an alias to target a different function version. After the update propagates, typically within a few seconds, 100% of function invocations execute the new version. Implementing canary deployments with this model required the development of an additional routing layer, further adding development time, complexity, and invocation latency. While rolling back a bad deployment of a Lambda function is a trivial operation and takes effect near instantaneously, deployments of new versions for critical functions can still be a potentially nerve-racking experience.

With the introduction of alias traffic shifting, it is now possible to trivially implement canary deployments of Lambda functions. By updating additional version weights on an alias, invocation traffic is routed to the new function versions based on the weight specified. [...]

Limit concurrent executions of AWS Lambda functions

You can now limit the concurrent execution impact of your Lambda functions by setting a function specific concurrency limit with the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. introductory blog post for more details:) task – refer to the resp. introductory blog post for more details:

Managing AWS Lambda Function Concurrency

You can now set a concurrency limit on individual Lambda functions in an account. The concurrency limit that you set reserves a portion of your account level concurrency for a given function. All of your functions’ concurrent executions count against this account-level limit by default.

If you set a concurrency limit for a specific function, then that function’s concurrency limit allocation is deducted from the shared pool and assigned to that specific function. AWS also reserves 100 units of concurrency for all functions that don’t have a specified concurrency limit set. This helps to make sure that future functions have capacity to be consumed. [...]

Use the C# .NET Core 2.0 and Go 1.x runtimes for AWS Lambda functions

You can now use the C# .NET Core 2.0 and Go 1.x runtimes in the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. introductory blog posts for more details:

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.15 Release Notes.

Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards Gains API and CloudFormation Support

2017-09-30T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's after the fact addition of automation capabilities for CloudWatch Dashboards:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added programmatic creation and manipulation of CloudWatch dashboards and widgets to support use cases such as dynamic resource lifecycle tracking and consistent cross-account dashboard maintenance.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon CloudWatch Dashboards Gains API and CloudFormation Support.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.8

2017-08-10T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.8 – this release adds support for Confluence, and adds support for a destination URL to the AWS Management Console single sign-on (SSO) API. You can now use the AWS Resources macro to create dashboards and share deep links to the AWS Management console with your team. Get started quickly with the AWS Resources blueprint to provide example dashboards for AWS services and resources and AWS account management.

Highlights

Use Identity Federation for AWS in Confluence

You can now use Identity Federation for AWS in Confluence to gain the following benefits:

Federated AWS access for Atlassian users – Add long-term AWS security credentials (IAM users) once, configure AWS access for Atlassian groups and Confluence add-ons with temporary credentials and fine grained permissions via IAM Policies thereafter (Identity Broker)
Single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console – Grant your team SSO access to AWS accounts via the [AWS Management Console Login menu](https://utoolity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IFAWS/pages/107806733/Using+the+AWS+Management+Console+Login+menu
Share AWS services and resources with your team
- Use the [AWS Resources macro](https://utoolity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IFAWS/pages/124883846/Using+the+AWS+Resources+macro+in+Confluence to share deep links with optional single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console
- Use the AWS Resources blueprint to share and document your AWS resources with deep links and optional single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console
REST API for temporary AWS security credentials – GET temporary AWS security credentials for Confluence apps via the REST API (Token Vendor)

Create deep links to the AWS Management Console with the AWS Resources macro

You can now use the [AWS Resources macro](https://utoolity.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/IFAWS/pages/124883846/Using+the+AWS+Resources+macro+in+Confluence to create deep links with optional single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console.

You can either quickly get a default link to the AWS Management Console, or configure the macro to provide a custom deep link with SSO.

Create dashboards to document AWS resources with the AWS Resources blueprint

You can now use the AWS Resources blueprint to provide dashboards to share and document your AWS resources with deep links and optional single sign-on (SSO) to the AWS Management Console.

The blueprint currently provides two page templates:

AWS resources – Share deep links with optional SSO to AWS resources with your team
AWS account – Document an AWS account and provide SSO links for your team

Specify a destination URL when using the AWS Management console single sign-on (SSO) API

You can now specify an URL as the destination query parameter when using GET on the /rest/identity-federation-for-aws/2.0/connectors/{id}/console/url resource to create a deep link URL to the AWS Management Console with single sign-on (SSO).

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.8 Release Notes.

AWS Ops Automator

2017-08-01T16:32:00+02:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers its customers several methods to help automate manual tasks such as snapshot scheduling. However, it can be a challenge to automate these tasks on various AWS resources across multiple regions and accounts.

To help customers more easily manage cross-account and cross-region automation, AWS offers the AWS Ops Automator solution. This solution enables customers to easily configure schedules to automatically create, copy, and delete Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots, and copy and delete Amazon Redshift snapshots. The solution also enables you to automatically set the throughput capacity for Amazon DynamoDB on a schedule.

The AWS Ops Automator is designed to provide a core framework for automated tasks, allowing you to focus on extending the solution's functionality rather than managing the underlying infrastructure operations. The solution can be customized to include task audit trails, logging, resource selection, scaling, API request retries, completion handing for long tasks, and concurrency handling.

[...]

Amazon CloudWatch Events Gains Cross-Account Event Delivery

2017-07-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to ease cross-account tracking of CloudWatch events:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added cross-account event delivery to Amazon CloudWatch Events to support use cases such as the tracking of events across an entire organization and the handling of events in separate accounts to implement advanced security schemes.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon CloudWatch Events Gains Cross-Account Event Delivery.

AWS Tagging Strategies

2017-06-17T16:07:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How should I tag my AWS resources?:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) allows customers to assign metadata to their AWS resources in the form of tags. Each tag is a simple label consisting of a customer-defined key and an optional value that can make it easier to manage, search for, and filter resources. Although there are no inherent types of tags, they enable customers to categorize resources by purpose, owner, environment, or other criteria.

This webpage describes commonly used tagging categories and strategies to help AWS customers implement a consistent and effective tagging strategy. The following sections assume basic knowledge of AWS resources, tagging, detailed billing, and AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

[...]

AWS Multiple Account Security Strategy

2017-06-16T16:15:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How do I manage multiple AWS accounts for security purposes?:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is designed to enable customers to achieve huge gains in productivity, innovation, and cost reduction when they move to the AWS cloud. AWS offers a variety of services and features that allow for flexible control of cloud computing resources and also of the AWS account(s) managing those resources. On the account level, these options are designed to help provide proper cost allocation, agility, and security, however customers are sometimes unsure of how to best implement an account strategy—especially when working with multiple AWS accounts.

This webpage provides customers with account-level considerations, best practices, and high-level strategic guidance to help structure and manage multiple AWS accounts for security purposes. It also introduces a prescriptive, automated AWS solution that uses AWS Directory Service to authenticate with existing credentials, helping customers implement an identity-based security structure for their AWS accounts.

For information about organizing multiple accounts for billing purposes, see the AWS Multiple Account Billing Strategy Solution Brief.

[...]

Automation with AWS 1.2

2017-06-08T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.2 – this release adds a Bamboo task to run remote actions with AWS from Bamboo jobs in build and deployment projects, and adds utility functions to ease JSON escaping, URL encoding, and Base64 encoding. You can now use the Automate with AWS task with all available AWS actions, and you can compose action payloads with utility functions.

Highlights (Core)

Compose action payloads with utility functions

You can now compose action payloads with utility functions to ease JSON escaping, URL encoding, and Base64 encoding. If custom content within the JSON formatted parameters template is a JSON structure in itself, it needs to be escaped - this can now be achieved right within the template so that JSON content can simply be pasted from other sources for example:

{
  "FunctionName": "arn:aws:lambda:ap-southeast-2:123456789012:function:sample-AutomationWithAWSQuickstartLamb-1RRX37PWXZXLS",
  "Payload": "$util.escapeJson('{
      "Event":"$event.simpleName",
      "Timestamp": "$event.timestamp",
      "TraceID": "$event.traceId"
    }')"
}

Highlights (Bamboo)

Run remote actions with AWS from a Bamboo task

You can now use the Automate with AWS task to run remote actions with AWS from Bamboo jobs, specifically from builds and deployments. The task supports all available actions and supports injection of regular Bamboo variables and contextual entity variables into the action payload.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.2 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.14

2017-05-11T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.14 – this release adds support for providing task configuration as code via URLs, adds support for sharing objects via pre-signed URLs in Amazon S3, adds support for Custom Platforms in AWS Elastic Beanstalk, and adds support for the Python 3.6 runtime in AWS Lambda. You can now inject task configuration for JSON and YAML parameters via URLs to provide configuration as code, generate a pre-signed S3 URL to temporarily share private S3 objects with subsequent build steps, use your own custom Elastic Beanstalk platform created with HashiCorp's Packer, and create an AWS Lambda Function with the Python 3.6 runtime.

Highlights

Provide task configuration as code

Just in time with Atlassian's introduction of Bamboo Specs in Bamboo 6.0, we are contributing our own improvement to configuration as code by offering to Inject task configuration via URLs:

As of Tasks for AWS 2.14, you can provide JSON or YAML based task parameters as code by referencing configuration files via URLs. You can reference a configuration file from the build working directory via the file:// protocol, or from a publicly accessible web location via the http:// and https:// protocols (this also allows to reference a configuration file from a private S3 bucket via a pre-signed URL.

Generate pre-signed URLs for S3 objects

You can now use the Amazon S3 Object task to generate a pre-signed URL to temporarily share private S3 objects with subsequent build steps.

The action currently supports GET – if you have a use case for PUT, HEAD or DELETE, please vote and comment on As a user, I want an S3 Object task action to generate a pre-signed URL so that I can PUT private objects in subsequent tasks (UAA-259)

Use custom platforms in Elastic Beanstalk environments

You can now use Custom Platforms as a third configuration source in the AWS Elastic Beanstalk Environment task:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk is excited to announce the support for Custom Platforms. You can now create and manage your own custom Elastic Beanstalk platforms as per your application and configuration requirements. Earlier, you could only use the pre-configured platforms provided by AWS Elastic Beanstalk. With pre-configured platforms, to customize your environment configuration you have to add .ebextensions to your application sources bundle or use the limited configuration options available on the Management Console or EB CLI. With Custom Platform, as an author you get greater control over the AMI, metadata, and configuration options. This feature allows you to enforce and manage standardization and your best practices across your Elastic Beanstalk environments. For example, you can now create your own platforms on Ubuntu or Red Hat Enterprise and customize your instances with languages/frameworks currently not supported by Elastic Beanstalk e.g. Rust, Sinatra etc.

Custom platforms are region specific and need to be deliberately created, refer to Custom Platforms for details.

Use the Python 3.6 runtime in AWS Lambda functions

You can now use the Python 3.6 runtime in the AWS Lambda Function task – refer to the resp. announcement for more details:

AWS Lambda Supports Python 3.6

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.14 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.13

2017-05-09T16:12:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.13 – this release adds optional AWS security credentials validation at configuration time, adds explicit handling of the non standard AWS partitions AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US), adds support for the Node.js 6.10 runtime in AWS Lambda, and adds support for the Packer der in AWS Elastic Beanstalk. You can now ensure that provided AWS security credentials are valid, enable non standard AWS partitions as a Labs Feature, create an AWS Lambda Function with the Node.js 6.10 runtime, and create your own custom Elastic Beanstalk platform with HashiCorp's Packer.

Highlights

Validate AWS security credentials at configuration time

Any new or edited task now validates the provided AWS security credentials at configuration time by default to capture errors as early as possible.

Given long-term AWS security credentials can be disabled to allow for the highly recommended regular key rotation, it is still possible to check Skip validation to cater for this and related scenarios where the underlying AWS access key is not currently valid.

Improved support for non standard AWS partitions (experimental)

The non standard AWS regions China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) have been enabled for use already. However, due to not being based in either China or the US, we are not in a position to test this add-on with those regions directly. Thanks to feedback from users with access to those regions we have identified some resulting inconsistencies and bugs, which have been addressed by being more explicit about the underlying AWS partition concept (see the info box below for some background) – here is what you need to know about this change:

Non standard AWS partitions and their regions are now disabled by default and must explicitly be opted into as outlined in Enabling Labs Features.
If you are Providing AWS Security Credentials via Identity Federation for AWS, the non standard partition must be enabled in both add-ons!
If you have been using the China (Beijing) region before, you need to opt-in again as outlined in Support for the AWS China partition – existing tasks are not affected at runtime, however, the China (Beijing) region is not offered in the region widget anymore by default.
Once enabled, you need to specify the appropriate partition when Configuring an AWS Access Key so that the add-on can use the partition specific AWS endpoints at runtime.
Since most AWS users won't have access to non standard AWS regions, the Partition option is hidden until any non standard AWS partition is enabled.

What is an AWS partition?

The AWS partition concept pretty much lacks documentation so far and is only mentioned in passing here and there, most notably within Amazon Resource Names (ARNs) and AWS Service Namespaces:

partition – The partition that the resource is in. For standard AWS regions, the partition is aws. If you have resources in other partitions, the partition is aws-partitionname. For example, the partition for resources in the China (Beijing) region is aws-cn.

Support for the Node.js 6.10 runtime in AWS Lambda tasks

You can now use the Node.js 6.10 runtime in the AWS Lambda Function task, see the resp. announcements:

AWS Lambda now supports Node 6.10

Node.js runtime support policy

Utoolity follows the AWS Node.js runtime support policy that has been detailed in the announcement as follows:

You can continue to use Node v4.3 to create AWS Lambda functions. Node 0.10 was deprecated for new functions in Jan 2017, and we recommend switching to Node v4.3 or Node v6.10 at the earliest. To learn more about our Node runtime policy, visit our documentation.

Specifically, we have deprecated the Node.js 0.10 in Tasks for AWS 2.12 and will remove the option after it can not be used anymore in AWS Lambda (April 30th 2017).

Support for i3.* EC2 instances and Packer 0.12.1 in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcement: Release: AWS Elastic Beanstalk on 2017-02-22 Release: AWS Elastic Beanstalk on 2017-03-08

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.13 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.7

2017-04-18T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.7 – this release continues our journey towards increased usability and easier onboarding. It adds explicit handling of the non standard AWS partitions AWS China and AWS GovCloud (US), and updates the provided CloudFormation templates to ease provisioning of AWS resources. You can now opt in to and out of non standard AWS partitions, and you can provision AWS resources with CloudFormation templates using improvements like YAML format and simplified string substitution.

Highlights

Opt in to and out of non standard AWS partitions (experimental)

The non standard AWS regions China (Beijing) and AWS GovCloud (US) have been enabled for use already. However, due to not being based in either China or the US, we are not in a position to test this add-on with those regions directly. Thanks to feedback from users with access to those regions we have identified some resulting inconsistencies and bugs, which have been addressed by being more explicit about the underlying AWS partition concept (see the info box below for some background) – here is what you need to know about this change:

Non standard AWS partitions and their regions are now disabled by default and must explicitly be opted into as outlined in Enabling Labs Features.
- If you have been using the China (Beijing) region before, you need to opt-in again as outlined in Support for the AWS China partition – existing tasks are not affected at runtime, however, the China (Beijing) region is not offered in the region widget anymore by default.
Once enabled, you need to specify the appropriate partition when Configuring an AWS Access Key so that the add-on can use the partition specific AWS endpoints at runtime.
- Since most AWS users won't have access to non standard AWS regions, the Partition option is hidden until any non standard AWS partition is enabled.
The AWS partition is now surfaced as a new partition field in the REST API.

Provision AWS resources with CloudFormation templates

We have added a set of CloudFormation templates to ease provisioning AWS resources in release 2.6.0. Since then, CloudFormation has gained two notable usability improvements by supporting templates in YAML format and simplified string substitution, and we have now updated the available templates accordingly:

Identity Federation for AWS (Core) – These resources are semantically required and we recommend to provision a dedicated IAM role indeed.
Identity Federation for AWS (Quickstart) – These resources aim to get you started quickly by covering the basic use cases

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.7 Release Notes.

Atlassian Opens up Team Health Monitors and Team Playbook Blueprints

2017-04-12T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about team building and conflict resolution at Atlassian:

After introducing a tool-agnostic version of its Team Health Monitors at Summit 2016, Atlassian now also bundles Team Playbook blueprints with the recently released Confluence Server 6.1. A Health Monitor workshop is a team self-assessment aiming to identify pain points and formulate a plan to address weak spots by running low-ceremony "plays" that "can help improve a team's overall health".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Atlassian Opens up Team Health Monitors and Team Playbook Blueprints.

AWS Organizations Offers Centralized Policy-Based Account Management

2017-03-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to introduce centralized and policy based cross-account cost and security governance at scale:

After a three month preview since re:Invent 2016, Amazon Web Services has recently moved AWS Organizations to general availability. The new service allows users to centrally manage multiple AWS accounts within a hierarchy of organizational units and attach service control policies with fine-grained access permissions. AWS Organizations also supersede the formerly separate consolidated billing feature.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Organizations Offers Centralized Policy-Based Account Management.

Native AWS Security-Logging Capabilities

2017-03-30T16:25:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in What are the native AWS security-logging capabilities?:

Each AWS service provides operational metrics or log files to provide insight into how the service is operating. Additionally, many AWS services generate security log data, including audit logs for access, configuration changes, and billing events. However, these security logging capabilities are described in multiple whitepapers, service documentation, and presentations. This webpage consolidates this information to provide a high-level overview of the native AWS audit log capabilities. For more information about logging for regulatory compliance, please see the whitepaper Security at Scale: Logging in AWS. The following sections assume basic knowledge of the AWS platform and a general understanding of audit and access logs.

[...]

New Quick Start deploys Confluence Data Center from Atlassian on the AWS Cloud

2017-03-27T16:32:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Quick Starts collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS quick start in New Quick Start deploys Confluence Data Center from Atlassian on the AWS Cloud:

AWS has published a new Quick Start that automatically deploys Confluence Data Center into a highly available, secure AWS Cloud environment in less than 30 minutes.

Atlassian’s Confluence Data Center is a self-managed team collaboration solution. It provides high availability, performance at scale, and disaster recovery for uninterrupted access to Confluence for all your teams. This new release joins two other Atlassian offerings in the Quick Start catalog: Bitbucket Data Center on AWS and JIRA products on AWS.

[...]

Automation with AWS 1.1

2017-02-24T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.1 – this release adds a new action for AWS Step Functions state machines to enable coordination of components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. You can now use the Start Step Functions Execution action with all existing integrations for Bamboo, JIRA and JIRA Service Desk.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Start Step Functions Execution action

You can now use the Start Step Functions Execution action to process Bamboo notifications, JIRA workflow transitions and JIRA Service Desk automation rule executions with AWS Step Functions to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows:

Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application. Step Functions provides a graphical console to arrange and visualize the components of your application as a series of steps. This makes it simple to build and run multi-step applications. Step Functions automatically triggers and tracks each step, and retries when there are errors, so your application executes in order and as expected. Step Functions logs the state of each step, so when things do go wrong, you can diagnose and debug problems quickly. You can change and add steps without even writing code, so you can easily evolve your application and innovate faster.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.1 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.12

2017-02-16T16:35:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.12 – this release adds a new task to deploy and operate AWS Step Functions state machines to enable coordination of components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows, adds support for Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) placement policies, and adds support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk application lifecycle management. You can now create/start/stop/delete AWS Step Functions state machines, specify placement policies when registering Amazon ECS Task Definitions, creating Amazon ECS Services, and running Amazon ECS Tasks, and specify application lifecycle policies when creating an AWS Elastic Beanstalk Application.

Highlights

New task for AWS Step Functions

Use the AWS Step Functions State Machine task in Bamboo to create, start, stop and delete AWS Step Functions state machines:

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows. Building applications from individual components that each perform a discrete function lets you scale and change applications quickly. Step Functions is a reliable way to coordinate components and step through the functions of your application.

Continuous Delivery approval workflows

An introductory blog post also emphasizes a notable use case for Continuous Delivery with Bamboo and Tasks for AWS:

A common use case for AWS Step Functions is a task that requires human intervention (for example, an approval process). Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications as a series of steps in a visual workflow called a state machine. You can quickly build and run state machines to execute the steps of your application in a reliable and scalable fashion.

In this post, I describe a serverless design pattern for implementing manual approval steps. You can use a Step Functions activity task to generate a unique token that can be returned later indicating either approval or rejection by the person making the decision.

Support for Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) placement policies

You can now use the recently introduced Amazon ECS task placement policies:

Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) now supports the ability to customize the placement of tasks on container instances. Previously, you would have to write custom schedulers to filter, find, and group resources if you needed to place a task on a container instance with certain resource requirements (e.g., a specific instance type).

Now, you can customize how tasks are placed based on built-in attributes such as instance type, availability zone, or custom attributes that you define. For example, you can use attributes such as environment=production to label resources, use the list APIs to find those resources, and use the RunTask and CreateService APIs to schedule tasks on those resources. You can also use placement strategies such as bin pack and spread to further define where tasks are placed. You can chain policies together to achieve sophisticated placement capabilities without writing any code. [...]

The introductory blog post provides a detailed explanation and illustrations for the available placement constraints and strategies.

Support for AWS Elastic Beanstalk application version lifecycle management

You can now use the recently introduced Application Version Lifecycle Management and CloudWatch Logs Streaming in:

AWS Elastic Beanstalk now supports lifecycle management of your application versions. Previously, you could not automate the removal of unused application versions, requiring you to manually delete application versions in the Elastic Beanstalk console or via APIs. Now, you can enable auto-deletion of application versions based on application version count or application version age. [...] Visit the documentation to learn more.

In addition, logs on Amazon EC2 instances managed by Elastic Beanstalk can now be monitored in real-time using Amazon CloudWatch Logs. [...] To learn more about this feature, visit our documentation.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.12 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.6

2017-02-16T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.6 – this release marks the begin of a journey towards increased usability and easier onboarding. It adds optional AWS security credentials validation at configuration time and aligns AWS entity references with established terms from the official AWS glossary.

Highlights

Validate long-term AWS security credentials at configuration time

Any new or edited AWS access key is now validated at configuration time by default to capture errors as early as possible.

Given long-term AWS security credentials can be disabled to allow for the highly recommended regular key rotation, it is still possible to check Skip validation to cater for this and related scenarios where the underlying AWS access key is not currently valid.

Encounter familiar terms for established AWS concepts

AWS has meanwhile established an official glossary for the expanding number of concepts in its ever growing service portfolio. A few of our initial naming choices have been increasingly at odds with how the underlying concepts are referenced in the AWS documentation, so we have replaced those legacy deviations with the terms users are now familiar with - notable changes are:

the former Account (IAM User) credentials provider is now referred to as either Credentials or an Access Key, depending on context
the former Account (IAM User) principal type is now referred to as IAM User (session token)

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.6 Release Notes.

Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Gains FIFO Queues

2016-12-31T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's new ordered exactly-once Amazon SQS processing mode:

Amazon's Simple Queue Service (SQS) recently gained FIFO (first-in, first-out) queues, which are designed to "guarantee that messages are processed exactly once, in the order that they are sent, and without duplicates". AWS rolled out this new queue type in the US East (Ohio) and US West (Oregon) regions and "plans to make it available in many others in early 2017".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) Gains FIFO Queues.

AWS Launches Amazon Linux Container Image

2016-11-28T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to improve Docker based dev/prod parity for Amazon Linux based workloads:

AWS recently launched a Docker container image for its Amazon Linux operating system, complementing the EC2 specific Amazon Linux AMI with a versatile deployment option for custom cloud and on-premise environments. The image is available through the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (Amazon ECR), and also as an official repository on Docker Hub.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Launches Amazon Linux Container Image.

EBS Snapshot Scheduler

2016-10-16T16:13:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How can I take automatic Amazon EBS snapshots?:

To help improve data protection and recovery, it is a best practice to regularly back up Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances using Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) snapshots. Amazon EBS snapshots contain the information needed to restore your data from the time the snapshot was taken to a new Amazon EBS volume. AWS customers can use snapshots to instantiate multiple new volumes, expand the size of a volume, or move volumes across Regions and Availability Zones.

The EBS Snapshot Scheduler is an AWS-provided solution that enables customers to create an automated snapshot schedule for their Amazon EBS volumes in minutes. The solution is easy to deploy and automatically manages snapshot creation and deletion using parameters that you define. For customers who do not have a mechanism for taking regular snapshots, this solution provides an easy way to improve data protection and recoverability.

This webpage provides best practices for implementing automated backup and recovery actions on resources, as well as an overview of the EBS Snapshot Scheduler design and functionality.

[...]

New AWS Quick Starts for Atlassian JIRA Software and Bitbucket Data Center

2016-10-12T16:32:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Quick Starts collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS quick starts in New AWS Quick Starts for Atlassian JIRA Software and Bitbucket Data Center:

The AWS Quick Starts help you to rapidly deploy reference implementations of software solutions on the AWS Cloud. You can use the Quick Starts to easily test drive and consume software while taking advantage of best practices promoted by AWS and the software partner.

Today I would like to tell you about a pair of Quick Start guides that were developed in collaboration with APN Advanced Technology Partner (and DevOps competency holder) Atlassian to help you to deploy their JIRA Software Data Center and Bitbucket Data Center on AWS.

Atlassian’s Data Center offerings are designed for customers that have large development teams and a need for scalable, highly available development and project management tools. Because these tools are invariably mission-critical, robustness and resilience are baseline requirements, production deployments are always run in a multi-node or cluster configuration.

[...]

Automation with AWS 1.0

2016-10-02T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Automation with AWS 1.0 – this release adds a Bamboo notification recipient, a JIRA post function and a JIRA Service Desk then action to run remote actions with AWS from workflows, and adds actions for AWS Lambda functions and Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) topics. You can use the Invoke Lambda Function and Publish SNS Message actions with all integrations for Bamboo and JIRA.

Highlights (Core)

Use the Invoke Lambda Function action

You can now use the Invoke Lambda Function action to process Bamboo notifications, JIRA workflow transitions and JIRA Service Desk automation rule executions with AWS Lambda, which lets you run code without provisioning or managing servers:

You pay only for the compute time you consume - there is no charge when your code is not running. With Lambda, you can run code for virtually any type of application or backend service - all with zero administration. Just upload your code and Lambda takes care of everything required to run and scale your code with high availability. You can set up your code to automatically trigger from other AWS services or call it directly from any web or mobile app.

Use the Publish SNS Message action

You can now use the Publish SNS Message action to relay Bamboo notifications, JIRA workflow transitions and JIRA Service Desk automation rule executions via the Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS), a fast, flexible, fully managed push notification service that lets you send individual messages or to fan-out messages to large numbers of recipients:

Amazon SNS makes it simple and cost effective to send push notifications to mobile device users, email recipients or even send messages to other distributed services.

With Amazon SNS, you can send notifications to Apple, Google, Fire OS, and Windows devices, as well as to Android devices in China with Baidu Cloud Push. You can use SNS to send SMS messages to mobile device users worldwide.

Beyond these endpoints, Amazon SNS can also deliver messages to Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS), AWS Lambda functions, or to any HTTP endpoint.

Highlights (Bamboo)

Run remote actions with AWS from a Bamboo notification recipient

You can now use the Automate with AWS notification recipient to run remote actions with AWS from Bamboo notifications, specifically from plan level and system level notifications.

Highlights (JIRA)

Run remote actions with AWS from a JIRA post function

You can now use the Automate with AWS post function to run remote actions with AWS from JIRA workflow post functions.

Run remote actions with AWS from a JIRA Service Desk then action

You can now use the Automate with AWS then action to run remote actions with AWS from JIRA Service Desk automation rules.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Automation with AWS 1.0 Release Notes.

EC2 Scheduler

2016-09-16T16:07:00+02:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers infrastructure on demand so that customers can control their resource capacity and pay only for what they consume. One simple method to reduce Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) costs is to stop Amazon EC2 instances that are not in use, and then start those instances again when their capacity is needed.

The EC2 Scheduler is a simple AWS-provided solution that enables customers to easily configure custom start and stop schedules for their Amazon EC2 instances. The solution is easy to deploy and can help reduce operational costs for both development and production environments. For customers who leave all of their Amazon EC2 instances running 24 hours a day, this solution can result in up to 70% cost savings for those instances that are only necessary during regular business hours.

This webpage provides best practices for implementing automated actions on resources, as well as an overview of the EC2 Scheduler design and functionality.

[...]

AWS Secure Initial Account Setup

2016-09-12T16:45:00+02:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How do I ensure I set up my AWS account securely?:

AWS provides many account-level security options and tools that allow customers to meet their security objectives and implement the appropriate controls for their business functions. This webpage provides baseline security guidance for AWS accounts to help customers gain confidence that they have securely set up and initialized an account according to AWS best practices. For additional security guidance on managing multiple AWS accounts, see the AWS Multiple Account Security Strategy Solution Brief.

The following sections assume basic knowledge of AWS accounts, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS CloudTrail, Amazon CloudWatch, AWS Config, and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

[...]

Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Gains Worldwide SMS Delivery

2016-08-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's expanded feature set and worldwide delivery options Amazon SNS based SMS messages:

Amazon's Simple Notification Service (SNS) recently gained worldwide SMS delivery and can now be used in five additional Amazon Web Services (AWS) regions. AWS also added several new features such as opt-out management, direct publishing, delivery status monitoring, and spending limits.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS) Gains Worldwide SMS Delivery.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.5

2016-07-28T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.5 – this release adds an option to the AWS Credentials Variables task in Bamboo for returning AWS IAM caller identity details so that these can be made available to other tools by injecting them via variables into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Script task, and adds a REST API for AWS IAM caller identity details.

Highlights

AWS Credentials Variables task for Bamboo gains option to return IAM caller identity

Use the AWS Credentials Variables task in Bamboo to return details about the IAM identity whose credentials are used to call the API (notable the AWS account ID and user ID) and make them available to other tools by injecting them into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Script task.

AWS Credentials Variables task and Tasks for AWS

The AWS Credentials Variables task complements the dedicated AWS build and deployment tasks offered by Tasks for AWS by providing managed temporary AWS security credentials as Bamboo variables for tools that are not directly integrated with Identity Federation for AWS, but accept AWS credentials via the command line or environment variables, for example the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI).

Usage of the AWS Credentials Variables task is free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the Licensing & Purchasing FAQ for details.

AWS IAM Caller Identity retrieval via REST API

Retrieve details about the IAM identity whose credentials are used to call the API (notable the AWS account ID and user ID) via the REST API so that developers can easily integrate this feature into their own solutions.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.5 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.11

2016-07-28T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.11 – this release adds new actions for AWS CloudFormation change sets to enable Continuous Delivery approval workflows, and adds support for using IAM roles with Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) tasks. You can now create/execute/delete change sets for AWS CloudFormation Stacks, and specify IAM roles when registering Amazon ECS Task Definitions and running/starting Amazon ECS Tasks.

Highlights

New AWS CloudFormation Stack task actions for change sets

Use the AWS CloudFormation Stack task in Bamboo to create, execute and delete AWS CloudFormation change sets:

You can now view change sets before updating your stacks in AWS CloudFormation. This helps you understand the resource-level changes (e.g. adding, deleting, or modifying instances) which CloudFormation will apply to your live stack when you are updating your AWS infrastructure. Previously, you could not see the specific changes that CloudFormation would apply to your stack before submitting changes.

You can create one or multiple change sets for your existing stack by submitting a modified template, new parameter values (e.g. the instance type for your EC2 instances), or both. The change set will display a list of proposed changes, such as which resources CloudFormation will add, modify, or delete. You can then instruct CloudFormation to implement the changes to your stack.

Continuous Delivery approval workflows

The introductory blog post also emphasizes the main use case for Continuous Delivery with Bamboo and Tasks for AWS:

In addition to additional insight into potential changes, this new model also opens the door to additional control over updates. You can use IAM to control access to specific CloudFormation functions such as UpdateStack, CreateChangeSet, DescribeChangeSet, and ExecuteChangeSet. You could allow a large group developers to create and preview change sets, and restrict execution to a smaller and more experienced group. With some additional automation, you could raise alerts or seek additional approvals for changes to key resources such as database servers or networks.

Support for IAM Roles in Amazon EC2 Container (ECS) tasks

You can now use the recently introduced IAM Roles for ECS Tasks when registering a task definition with the Amazon ECS Task Definition task, and when running or starting a task with the Amazon ECS Task task:

Now, you can specify an IAM role for each ECS task. The applications in the task’s containers can then use the AWS SDK or CLI to make API requests to authorized AWS services. This allows the EC2 instance to have a minimal role, respecting the ‘Least Privilege’ access policy and allowing you to manage the instance role and the task role separately. You will also gain visibility as to which task is using which role, tracked in the CloudTrail logs.

Read more about IAM roles for tasks on the AWS Compute Blog and in the Amazon ECS documentation. [...]

The tasks to deploy and manage Docker containers with the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) have been introduced in Tasks for AWS 2.7.

Support for Docker 1.11, Go 1.5, and Node.js 5/6 in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcement:

Release: AWS Elastic Beanstalk on 2016-06-26

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.11 Release Notes.

Bitbucket Pipelines Provides Continuous Delivery within Atlassian’s Bitbucket Cloud

2016-06-28T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's efforts to provide an integrated Continuous Delivery pipeline for its Git and Mercurial hosting service Bitbucket Cloud:

Atlassian released Bitbucket Pipelines beta at AtlasCamp 2016 in Barcelona to provide a Continuous Delivery pipeline within Bitbucket Cloud. At the same time, Atlassian announced the end-of-life for their current cloud based CI/CD solution Bamboo Cloud by 31 January 2017, while emphasizing that Bamboo Server continues to be their on-premise CI/CD offering for Bitbucket Server (formerly Stash).

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Bitbucket Pipelines Provides Continuous Delivery within Atlassian’s Bitbucket Cloud.

AWS Multiple Account Billing Strategy

2016-06-26T16:45:00+02:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) enables customers to achieve significant gains in productivity, innovation, and cost reduction when they move to the AWS cloud. AWS offers a variety of services and features that allow for flexible control of cloud computing resources and also of the AWS account(s) managing those resources. These options help to ensure proper cost allocation, agility, and security, however customers are sometimes unsure of how to best implement an account strategy—especially when working with multiple AWS accounts.

This webpage provides customers with account-level considerations, best practices, and high-level strategic guidance to help customers use AWS Organizations to structure and manage multiple AWS accounts for billing purposes.

For information about organizing multiple accounts for security purposes, see the AWS Multiple Account Security Strategy Solution Brief.

[...]

Identity Federation for AWS 2.4

2016-02-18T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.4 – this release adds an Amazon ECR Credentials Variables task to Bamboo for providing temporary Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) authentication credentials to other tools by injecting them via variables into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Docker task, adds a REST API for temporary Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) authentication credentials, and adds support for assuming another IAM role from EC2 instance profile credentials used by an Elastic Bamboo agent.

Highlights

Amazon ECR Credentials Variables task for Bamboo

Use the Amazon ECR Credentials Variables task in Bamboo to provide temporary Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) authentication credentials for other tools by injecting them into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Docker task.

Use Amazon ECR Credentials with Bamboo Docker task

The most frequent use case for the Amazon ECR Credentials Variables task is to enable the built-in Bamboo Docker task to push images to an Amazon ECR repository - refer to How to push a Docker image to a repository in your Amazon ECR registry with the Bamboo Docker task for details.

Amazon ECR Credentials retrieval via REST API

Retrieve temporary Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) authentication credentials via the REST API so that developers can easily integrate this feature into their own solutions.

Support for assuming another IAM Role from EC2 Instance Profile credentials

The IAM Role for EC2 (Agent) option in the AWS Credentials Variables and Amazon ECR Credentials Variables tasks for Bamboo now supports assuming another IAM role from the EC2 instance profile credentials - this enables various scenarios, notably switching to roles accross your own AWS accounts and third-party.AWS accounts (cross-account IAM roles).

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.4 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.10

2016-02-18T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.10 – this release adds an Amazon ECR Credentials Variables task to Bamboo for providing temporary Amazon EC2 Container Registry authentication credentials to other tools by injecting them via variables into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Docker task, supports additional deployment options for the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), and adds support for assuming another IAM role from EC2 instance profile credentials used by an Elastic Bamboo agent.

Highlights

New task to provide Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) Credentials Variables

This task is provided by Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo), which is bundled and free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the Licensing & Purchasing FAQ for details.

Use Amazon ECR Credentials with Bamboo Docker task

Additional deployment options for the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS)

You can now use the recently introduced additional deployment parameters when creating or updating a service with the Amazon ECS Service task:

Minimum Healthy Percent — specify a lower limit on the number of running tasks during a deployment (to deploy without using additional cluster capacity)
Maximum Percent — specify an upper limit on the number of running tasks during a deployment (to define the deployment batch size)

The tasks to deploy and manage Docker containers with the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) have been introduced in Tasks for AWS 2.7.

Support for assuming another IAM Role from EC2 Instance Profile credentials

The IAM Role for EC2 (Agent) option in all tasks for Bamboo now supports assuming another IAM role from the EC2 instance profile credentials - this enables various scenarios, notably switching to roles accross your own AWS accounts and third-party AWS accounts (cross-account IAM roles).

Support for t2.nano EC2 instances, Docker 1.9 and the Amazon EC2 Container Registry (ECR) in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcements:

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.10 Release Notes.

IAM in Practice

2016-02-09T16:45:00+01:00

Utoolity maintains a curated AWS Answers collection with AWS solutions related to Utoolity apps in the Atlassian Marketplace. Learn about this recent AWS solution in How do I set up IAM for my organization?:

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) is a powerful and flexible web service for controlling access to AWS resources. IAM enables customers to leverage the agility and efficiency of the cloud while maintaining secure control of their organization’s AWS infrastructure. IAM Administrators new to AWS can be sometimes overwhelmed by the options available as they face competing goals: securing the environment while quickly enabling new users to accomplish their jobs. Further complicating the task, the initial controls they implement must grow and adapt without disrupting productivity as the company navigates its path to the cloud.

This webpage provides best practices and guidance to help IAM administrators quickly establish an initial set of controls that protect their infrastructure, empower users, and allow for growth and change in their organization’s use of AWS. The following sections assume a working knowledge of how to configure the IAM service.

[...]

Tasks for AWS 2.9

2015-11-30T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.9 – this release adds new tasks to deploy and operate AWS OpsWorks apps, adds new actions to support AWS Lambda versions and aliases, and adds a ZIP archive option for artifact uploads to Amazon S3. You can now create/update/delete OpsWorks Apps, run app and stack commands with OpsWorks Deployments, publish new Lambda Function versions and create/update/delete Lambda Function aliases, and upload ZIP archives as S3 Objects.

Highlights

New tasks for AWS OpsWorks

You can now facilitate Amazon Web Service's Chef based application management service AWS OpsWorks, which makes it easy to deploy and operate applications of all shapes and sizes - this is enabled by two new tasks:

New actions for AWS Lambda

You can now also use the recently introduced AWS Lambda Function Versioning and Aliases - this is enabled by four new actions:

Publish versions with the AWS Lambda Function task
You can also publish a version directly with the create/update function actions.
Create/Update/Delete aliases with the AWS Lambda Function task

The tasks to deploy and manage event-driven code to AWS Lambda have been introduced in Tasks for AWS 2.8.

ZIP archive option for Amazon S3

You can now compress files into a ZIP archive before uploading with the Amazon S3 Object task to ease using AWS services that support or require the deployment artifact to be a ZIP archive - this is enabled by a new option for the Upload File(s) action:

Upload as ZIP archive - Check to compress the selected file(s) into a single ZIP archive before uploading. Uncheck to upload separately.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.9 Release Notes.

Atlassian Launches JIRA 7 Platform with Three Standalone JIRA Editions

2015-10-08T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's efforts to diversify its most successful product JIRA so that it appeals to a wider variety of teams:

Development and collaboration software vendor Atlassian released version 7 of its project tracking application JIRA as three new standalone products: JIRA Core, JIRA Software and JIRA Service Desk. All three products are build atop a common platform to better serve non-technical business teams, development teams as well as IT and other service teams with an edition tailored to each team’s needs.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Atlassian Launches JIRA 7 Platform with Three Standalone JIRA Editions.

AWS Simplifies Resource Access with VPC Endpoints, Initially Supporting S3

2015-08-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to simplify management and auditing of VPC network traffic by skipping the public internet:

Amazon Web Services recently introduced VPC endpoints to enable a "private connection between your VPC and another AWS service without requiring access over the Internet, through a NAT instance, a VPN connection, or AWS Direct Connect". VPC endpoint policies provide granular access control to other service's resources. Initially available are connections to Amazon S3, and other AWS services will be supported later on.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Simplifies Resource Access with VPC Endpoints, Initially Supporting S3.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.3

2015-08-26T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.3 – this release simplifies re-authentication during single sign-on (SSO) with the AWS Management Console, and adds a REST resource for SSO URL retrieval.

Highlights

Simplified re-authentication during single sign-on (SSO) with the AWS Management Console

The AWS response after an SSO session expiry now includes a link to directly re-authenticate the session and return to the AWS Management Console immediately.

Single sign-on (SSO) URL retrieval via REST API

The SSO URL can now be retrieved via the REST API so that developers can easily integrate this feature into their own solutions.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.3 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.8

2015-08-26T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.8 – this release adds new tasks to deploy and operate AWS Lambda functions and event source mappings, and can optionally tag Amazon ECS Tasks. You can now create/update/delete/invoke/entitle AWS Lambda functions, and create/update/delete AWS Lambda event source mappings.

Highlights

New tasks for AWS Lambda

You can now facilitate Amazon Web Service's new event-driven computing service AWS Lambda, which runs your code in response to events and automatically manages the compute resources for you - this is enabled by two new tasks:

Optionally specify a tag when running/starting an ECS Task

This adds the new ECS Task startedBy parameter, which is an optional tag specified when a task is started:

For example if you automatically trigger a task to run a batch process job, you could apply a unique identifier for that job to your task with the startedBy parameter. You can then identify which tasks belong to that job by filtering the results of a ListTasks call with the startedBy value.

See New tasks for the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) for the related former release notes.

Support for Enhanced Health Reporting, version 2 platform configurations and multiple WAR files in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcements:

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Support for Java and Go applications in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

(As of release 2.8.2)

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcements:

Announcing support for Java and Go applications

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.8 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.7

2015-05-05T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.7 – this release adds new tasks to deploy Docker containers to the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS), and supports succeeding a build for non existing AWS CloudFormation stacks. You can now create/update/delete Amazon ECS clusters and services, run/start/stop Amazon ECS tasks, and register Amazon ECS task definitions.

Highlights

New tasks for the Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS)

You can now facilitate Amazon Web Service's new highly scalable, high performance Amazon EC2 Container Service (ECS) to deploy Docker containers across your development, test, and production environments - this is enabled by four new tasks:

New task to provide AWS Credentials Variables

Use the AWS Credentials Variables task in Bamboo to provide managed temporary AWS security credentials for other tools by injecting them into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Script task.

This task is provided by Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo), which is bundled and free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the Licensing & Purchasing FAQ for details.

Optionally succeed CloudFormation delete action for non existing stacks

Similar to the 'Make it so' option for the create/update CloudFormation actions introduced in release 2.2, it is now possible to Don't fail for non existing stack for the CloudFormation delete action to ensure all preconditions for subsequent tasks are met.

Support for Docker 1.5, Node.js 0.12.0, Python 3.4, Ruby 2.2 and 2015.03 Amazon Linux AMI in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcements:

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.7 Release Notes.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.2

2015-04-29T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.2 – this release adds an AWS Credentials Variables task to Bamboo for providing managed temporary AWS security credentials to other tools by injecting them via variables into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Script task, and adds compatibility with JIRA Data Center.

Highlights

AWS Credentials Variables task for Bamboo

Use the AWS Credentials Variables task in Bamboo to provide managed temporary AWS security credentials for other tools by injecting them into AWS unaware tasks like the Bamboo Script task.

AWS Credentials Variables task and Tasks for AWS

Usage of the AWS Credentials Variables task is free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the Licensing & Purchasing FAQ for details.

Compatibility with JIRA Data Center

Identity Federation for AWS is now tested for compatibility with the clustering and high-availability capabilities of JIRA Data Center.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.2 Release Notes.

Atlassian's Stash Data Center Offers High Availability and Scalability for Git

2015-04-15T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's new Data Center deployment option for Stash:

Atlassian recently released Stash Data Center, a highly available and horizontally scalable deployment option for its on-premises source code and Git repository management solution Stash. New nodes can be added without downtime to provide active-active clustering and instant scalability.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Atlassian's Stash Data Center Offers High Availability and Scalability for Git.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Preconfigured Docker Containers for Go

2015-03-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's addition of Go language runtimes to its platform as a service offering Elastic Beanstalk:

After introducing "Preconfigured Docker" as a new category of supported platforms in November 2014 with initial support for Java/GlassFish and Python 3.4 containers, Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently added Go versions 1.3 and 1.4 as the first additional language based on this new approach to its platform as a service offering AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in [AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Preconfigured Docker Containers for Go](https://www.infoq.com/news/2015/03/aws-elastic-beanstalk-go/.

Bitbucket Launches Snippets for Teams

2015-03-19T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's efforts to provide a collaboration oriented code snippet sharing solution for teams:

Atlassian's popular source code hosting site Bitbucket launched Snippets for teams, a collaboration oriented solution to "create and manage multi-file snippets of all kinds". Snippets can be created via drag and drop, owned by a user or a team and optionally shared publicly. They are backed by Git or Mercurial repositories and can be managed via a REST API.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Bitbucket Launches Snippets for Teams.

Atlassian Launches HipChat Server for Team Collaboration Behind the Firewall

2015-02-17T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's new Server deployment option for HipChat:

Development and collaboration software vendor Atlassian recently launched HipChat Server, an on-premise version of its text, audio and video chat, file and screen sharing, as well as third party integration offering for team collaboration.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Atlassian Launches HipChat Server for Team Collaboration Behind the Firewall.

Amazon CloudWatch Supports JSON Logs and Integrates AWS CloudTrail

2015-02-12T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's expansion of log based CloudWatch metrics and alarms to JSON formatted logs and API events:

Shortly after releasing the AWS CloudTrail Processing Library (CPL), Amazon Web Services has also integrated AWS CloudTrail with Amazon CloudWatch Logs to enable alarms and respective "notifications from CloudWatch, triggered by specific API activity captured by CloudTrail". The implied support for monitoring JSON-formatted logs has recently been officially released as well.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon CloudWatch Supports JSON Logs and Integrates AWS CloudTrail.

Amazon EC2 Gains Two-Minute Warning for Spot Instance Termination

2015-01-31T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to widen applicable use cases for its low-cost EC2 instance pool:

Amazon EC2 recently gained two-minute warnings before Spot Instances are reclaimed, a feature "formally known as a Spot Instance Termination Notice". The goal is to "allow more types of applications to benefit from the scale and low price of Spot Instances" by giving them time to save state, upload log files, or deregister from other components such as load balancers or cluster managers.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon EC2 Gains Two-Minute Warning for Spot Instance Termination.

Tasks for AWS 2.6

2015-01-20T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.6 – this release adds new tasks to deploy code to Amazon EC2 instances with AWS CodeDeploy, and supports succeeding a build when Amazon EC2 resource filters aren't matching any resources. You can now create/stop/prepare AWS CodeDeploy deployments, and create/update/delete AWS CodeDeploy applications and deployment groups.

Highlights

New tasks for AWS CodeDeploy

You can now facilitate Amazon Web Service's new platform and language agnostic deployment automation offering AWS CodeDeploy to consistently deploy your application across your development, test, and production environments - this is enabled by three new tasks:

Optionally succeed Amazon EC2 resource tasks if no resources match the filter

The EC2 resource filter handling introduced in release 2.4.5 yields use cases where not matching any resources is valid and shouldn't trigger the build to fail. To account for such scenarios, you can now check the Don't fail for empty filter result option to prevent the task failing if no matching resources are found.

Support for Docker 1.3 in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, see the resp. announcements:

Announcing support for Docker 1.3.3

Updated solution stacks are always usable manually as soon as they are made available by AWS - this simply updates the user interface to include those for convenient selection.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.6 Release Notes.

AWS Releases CloudTrail Processing Library

2014-11-15T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's simplification of CloudTrail logs processing for application developers:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently released the AWS CloudTrail Processing Library (CPL), a "Java client library that makes it easy to build an application that reads and processes CloudTrail log files in a fault tolerant and highly scalable manner".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Releases CloudTrail Processing Library.

AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Preconfigured Docker Platform

2014-11-13T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to increase runtime choices for its platform as a service offering Elastic Beanstalk:

After gaining generic Docker support in July 2014, Amazon Web Services (AWS) now added "Preconfigured Docker" as a new category of supported platforms to its platform as a service offering AWS Elastic Beanstalk. This category of platforms is based on the recently added official repositories for language stacks on the Docker Hub Registry.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Elastic Beanstalk Adds Preconfigured Docker Platform.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.1

2014-11-10T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.1 – this release adds a new principal type 'Assume Role' to support IAM roles for delegating API access to AWS resources in other accounts (cross-account usage) and enabling API access to the IAM service itself.

Highlights

Third Principal Type 'Assume Role'

Use temporary credentials for configured IAM roles to delegate API access to AWS resources in other accounts (cross-account usage) and enable API access to AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) itself.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.1 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.5

2014-11-10T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.5 – this release adds support for IAM Roles (both for Amazon EC2 and the AssumeRole API), adds reuse of existing template and change of SNS topic on CloudFormation updates, and improves CloudFormation template parameter management by converting to JSON format.

Highlights

Support for IAM Roles

There are now two variations for working with IAM Roles:

IAM Roles for Amazon EC2

You can now use IAM Roles for Amazon EC2 to skip credentials configuration all together.

Elastic Bamboo only supports this as of Bamboo 5.6

This feature requires the Amazon EC2 instance running the agent to be started with an EC2 instance profile. This could be the host of the Bamboo server itself for local agents or regular remote agents that happen to run on an EC2 instance. However, Elastic Bamboo only supports configuring elastic images with an instance profile as of Bamboo 5.6.

IAM Roles for AssumeRole API

The embedded Identity Federation for AWS 2.1 release adds a new principal type 'Assume Role' to support IAM roles for delegating API access to AWS resources in other accounts (cross-account usage) and enabling API access to the IAM service itself.

Reuse of existing template and change of SNS topic for CloudFormation updates

Two recent CloudFormation API additions are now available during stack updates too:

AWS CloudFormation now provides you an option to update a stack by passing in only parameters. In this option, CloudFormation automatically uses the stack template it already has.
AWS CloudFormation has also introduced the ability to add or remove the Amazon SNS topics you use to monitor stack creation and updates.

Conversion of CloudFormation template parameter management to JSON

The former CSV format has severe usability issues for anything but a trivial amount of template parameters and does not support using existing values on updates. To address these deficits and foster reuse of configuration between the various AWS tools, the parameter management has been aligned to the JSON format supported by the AWS CLI.

The legacy CSV format remains available in tasks configured in previous versions for backwards compatibility, newly configured tasks support the new JSON format only.
An opt-in conversion is offered when the legacy CSV parameter composition can be translated into JSON automatically.

Support for Java 8 Tomcat 8, Python 3.4, Java 7 GlassFish 4.0, and Java 8 GlassFish 4.1 in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, notably including the recently introduced Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server Core stacks, see the resp. announcements:

The latter three platforms are based on the new category of supported platforms – Preconfigured Docker:

[...] This category of platforms is based on the language stacks provided by the Docker Official Repos on the Docker Hub Registry and allows us to provide you with the bleeding edge versions of additional language/framework platforms sooner. [...]

The ‘Preconfigured Docker’ platforms are delivered as Docker containers, this allows you to develop and test your applications locally using the same container that your application will be deployed to on Elastic Beanstalk. To run the Docker container locally, simply add a Dockerfile in your application’s root folder with the appropriate 'FROM' line, based on the platform you are using.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.5 Release Notes.

Amazon CloudWatch Gains Log Monitoring and Storage

2014-10-31T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's addition of log management capabilities to CloudWatch:

Amazon CloudWatch recently gained log file monitoring and storage for application, operating system and custom logs, and meanwhile enhanced support for Microsoft Windows Server to cover a wider variety of log sources.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Amazon CloudWatch Gains Log Monitoring and Storage.

Atlassian Launches Project Portfolio Management Solution for JIRA

2014-10-28T23:48:00+01:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's efforts to simplify project portfolio management for teams:

Development and collaboration software vendor Atlassian launched JIRA Portfolio, an add-on for JIRA that "provides a single, accurate view for planning and managing initiatives across multiple teams and projects", at its annual user conference Summit.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Atlassian Launches Project Portfolio Management Solution for JIRA.

AWS Adds Hooks Into Expanded Auto Scaling Lifecycle

2014-09-30T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about the AWS team's efforts to increase operational control over auto-scaled EC2 instances:

Amazon Web Services recently added several features to its Auto Scaling service to improve control over the managed Amazon EC2 instances. It is now possible to hook into the pending and terminating lifecycle state transitions to perform custom operations, which is also available for in service instances by means of a new standby state. The new DetachInstances API action now allows to remove instances from an Auto Scaling group.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Adds Hooks Into Expanded Auto Scaling Lifecycle.

Refreshed AWS Trusted Advisor Offers Several Free Checks

2014-08-31T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's slow migration to free automated best practices recommendations for AWS users:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has recently integrated the AWS Trusted Advisor into the AWS Management Console and made four security and service limit checks available at no charge. Additional checks from the security, performance, fault tolerance and cost optimization categories remain part of their Business and Enterprise support tiers.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Refreshed AWS Trusted Advisor Offers Several Free Checks.

Identity Federation for AWS 2.0

2014-08-15T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Identity Federation for AWS 2.0 – this major release adds support for Atlassian Bamboo, adds system scoped AWS credentials for elevated API usage without an active user session, and upgrades the API to version v2 to support secure configuration migration across instances/installations.

Highlights

Support for Atlassian Bamboo

Use Identity Federation for AWS in Atlassian Bamboo to gain the following benefits:

easy access to elastic agents via the AWS Management Console (see the Using Identity Federation for AWS for details)
reuse by other add-ons, such as Tasks for AWS

Cross Product Support

Identity Federation for AWS aims to be a cross product solution and currently supports JIRA, Confluence, and Bamboo (see the Identity Federation for AWS Compatibility Notes for details) - please don't hesitate to get in touch, if you are interested in support for other Atlassian products, we are eager to learn more about your use case and adjusting our respective roadmap accordingly.

Dedicated Add-ons per Application

Bamboo and JIRA are each supported via a new dedicated add-on per Atlassian application due to Marketplace restrictions for cross-product add-ons:

the former JIRA only add-on will be archived, but can technically be used in parallel to ease migrating to the new version (minor usability issues apply)
the add-ons operate independent right now, i.e. credentials need to be managed separately for each and duplicated if desired - cross-product usage via application links is on our mid-term roadmap

System scoped AWS credentials

An AWS connector can now be denoted as System scoped and then used from elevated code (e.g. within another add-on) without an active user session to allow usage within Atlassian Bamboo's Tasks for example, as facilitated by Tasks for AWS.

REST API v2

The API has been upgraded to Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) based IDs to support secure configuration migration across instances and installations (refer to the Developer Guide for details).

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Identity Federation for AWS 2.0 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.4

2014-08-15T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.4 – this release adds shared AWS security credentials management by integrating with Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo), persists credentials of type Inline through the Bamboo EncryptionService API, and adds support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server Core solution stacks in AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments.

Highlights

Shared AWS security credentials management

You can now manage AWS security credentials centrally by means of an integration with the Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo) add-on:

add long-term AWS security credentials (IAM users) once, configure AWS access for Atlassian groups with temporary credentials and fine grained permissions via IAM Policies thereafter (Identity Broker)
grant easy access to AWS resources directly via menu links to the AWS Management Console (see the User's Guide for details)

this can optionally include access to your elastic agents for administrators (or any other group with access to the resp. AWS Connector)

No Charge

Usage of Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo) is free for Tasks for AWS licensees, see the Licensing & Purchasing FAQ for details.

Improved security of Inline credentials persistence

AWS security credentials of type Inline are now persisted through the Bamboo EncryptionService API on Save for new or existing tasks.

No Real Encryption

Please note that the Bamboo EncryptionService API naming is misleading for the time being - as properly phrased in the method summary of com.atlassian.bamboo.security.EncryptionServiceImpl, the decrypt()/encrypt() methods just provide means to obfuscate sensitive data.

Real encryption is available by using the integration with Identity Federation for AWS (Bamboo) instead.

No Automatic Migration

Existing task configurations are not upgraded automatically, you need to explicitly edit and save them once. Given most users want to upgrade to shared AWS credentials managed via Identity Federation for AWS instead, we felt this to be an acceptable compromise - please get in touch if your situation requires a different approach, we are willing to discuss this on a case by case base.

Support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server Core solution stacks in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, notably including the recently introduced Windows Server 2012 R2 and Server Core stacks, see the resp. announcement and related posts:

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.4 Release Notes.

AWS Expands Credential Lifecycle Management and Monitoring

2014-07-29T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's improved password rotation self-service and credentials status visibility:

AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) recently expanded available password policy rules to enable self-service password rotation. A new credential report provides visibility into the AWS credentials security status. AWS also added logging of AWS Management Console sign-in events to AWS CloudTrail.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS Expands Credential Lifecycle Management and Monitoring.

AtlasCamp 2014 Highlights: New REST APIs and Data Center Offerings

2014-07-24T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Atlassian's new distributed add-on technology for adding features to its Cloud products:

Development and collaboration software vendor Atlassian held its annual developer conference AtlasCamp in Berlin, focusing on the recently launched Atlassian Connect 1.0, the new REST APIs for Confluence and HipChat as well as the JIRA and Confluence Data Center offerings for high availability and performance at scale.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AtlasCamp 2014 Highlights: New REST APIs and Data Center Offerings.

AWS CloudTrail Expands Auditing of API Calls

2014-06-25T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about AWS's expansion of CloudTrail support across its entire service portfolio:

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has considerably increased the number of services supported by AWS CloudTrail to cover the majority of the extensive AWS service portfolio. This now includes most compute and networking and all deployment and management services, thereby providing comprehensive end to end auditing of almost any changes to customer’s infrastructure.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in AWS CloudTrail Expands Auditing of API Calls.

IBM's Nick O'Leary Demos Node-RED for the Internet of Things

2014-05-26T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about IBM's bowser-based visual editing environment for IoT automation prototyping and customization:

Nick O'Leary presented Node-RED, an open-source project focused on the Internet of Things (IoT), at the last QCon London. The project, created by IBM's Emerging Technology team, provides a browser-based environment for visually "wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services in new and interesting ways". Node-RED is capable of running on low cost hardware such as the Raspberry Pi and in the cloud and aims to enable developers to "focus on the task at hand and not worry about the plumbing".

[...]

Continue reading the full post in IBM's Nick O'Leary Demos Node-RED for the Internet of Things.

Tasks for AWS 2.3

2014-04-30T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.3 – this release adds a new action to validate AWS CloudFormation stacks, support for stack policies and tags in the CloudFormation create/update actions and support for Docker and Ruby 2.0 solution stacks in AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments.

Highlights

New validate action for the 'AWS CloudFormation Stack' task

You can now validate an AWS CloudFormation stack separately from the existing create/update/delete actions to allow failing fast for errors in templates composed during the build.

Support for stack policies in CloudFormation create/update actions

AWS has recently announced the functionality to Prevent Updates to Stack Resources by means of applying a Stack Policy - this feature is now fully supported with the following options:

1) You can provide a stack policy during stack create actions. 2) You can update a stack policy during stack update actions. 3) You can provide a temporary stack policy during stack update actions (to allow updating of resources protected by a permanent stack policy).

Support for tags in CloudFormation create action

You can now specify Tags within the Advanced Options when creating a stack to identify your stack for purposes such as cost allocation (Tags defined for the stack are propagated to EC2 resources that are created as part of the stack).

Support for Docker and Ruby 2.0 solution stacks in AWS Elastic Beanstalk tasks

The available solution stacks have been updated to include the latest versions, notably including the recently introduced Docker and Ruby 2.0 stacks, see the resp. announcements: AWS Elastic Beanstalk adds Docker support (What's New?) or AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Docker (Blog) AWS Elastic Beanstalk announces Ruby 2.0 support (What's New?) or AWS Elastic Beanstalk for Ruby 2 (Blog)

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.3 Release Notes.

Microsoft's New OneNote Service API Backs Free Apps for Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android

2014-04-24T23:48:00+02:00

I have published an InfoQ news post about Microsoft's efforts to establish an ecosystem around its popular and now free digital note-taking app OneNote:

Microsoft recently announced the initial release of the OneNote API, which enables programmatic integration of its free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration tool across different programming languages and platforms like Windows, Windows Phone, iOS, Mac OS, Android and the web.

[...]

Continue reading the full post in Microsoft's New OneNote Service API Backs Free Apps for Windows, Mac OS, iOS and Android.

Tasks for AWS 2.2

2013-12-13T16:32:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.2 – this release adds a new task to create/update/rebuild/restart/swap/terminate AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, adds new tasks to create/update/delete AWS Elastic Beanstalk applications and application versions and adds a 'Make it so' option to the AWS CloudFormation task's create/update actions.

Highlights

New tasks for AWS Elastic Beanstalk

You can now facilitate Amazon Web Service's Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering AWS Elastic Beanstalk to quickly deploy and manage applications in the AWS cloud - this is enabled by three new tasks:

'Make it so' option for the create/update CloudFormation actions

To simplify common AWS CloudFormation usage scenarios, the Create stack action now allows to Update [the] stack, if it already exists.; similarly, the Update stack action allows to Create [the] stack, if it does not already exist.

Only shared options are supported
Please note that in both cases only the shared subset of options available for both actions is passed though to the 'Make it so' action - the more advanced options remain available via the dedicated tasks.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.2 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.1

2013-11-04T16:22:00+01:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.1 – this release adds a new task to upload/download/delete/copy Amazon S3 objects and support for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region (experimental).

Highlights

New task 'Amazon S3 Object'

Upload, download, copy or delete Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) objects from a task within your build or deployment projects:

Upload your job artifacts or select local files or directories (optionally via Ant Patterns)
Download S3 objects (files) addressed by their key prefix
Delete S3 objects (files) addressed by their key prefix
Copy S3 objects (files) addressed by their key prefix to a target bucket (with optional renaming)

Support for the AWS GovCloud (US) Region (experimental)

The AWS GovCloud (US) Region is an API compatible, but otherwise isolated AWS Region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements).

Support for regions in the AWS GovCloud (US) partition is an opt-in Labs Feature:

The AWS GovCloud (US) partition provides the following regions: AWS GovCloud (US) – us-gov-west-1
This partition requires dedicated credentials, see How do Government agencies, contractors and customers access the AWS GovCloud (US) Region?: "Customers cannot sign up for AWS GovCloud (US) through the traditional, online AWS sign up process. AWS must engage with the customer directly to sign an agreement specific to the AWS GovCloud (US) Region. [...]"
Due to being a non US company, we are not currently in the position to test this add-on with the AWS GovCloud (US) Region directly. However, the API is compatible in general and we have done our best to address the documented differences - please get in touch if things do not work as intended, we are very interested to collaborate on the necessary adjustments.

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.1 Release Notes.

Tasks for AWS 2.0

2013-09-12T16:32:00+02:00

The Utoolity team is pleased to present Tasks for AWS 2.0– this release adds support for Bamboo 5 Deployment Projects.

Highlights

Support for Bamboo Deployment Projects

Integrate AWS with Bamboo 5 Deployment Projects to gain the benefits of this reliable, scalable, and inexpensive computing platform where it is exceptionally useful in particular.

Commercial Support

We consider professional support a feature on its own and are very happy being able to sustain our support levels established for the OSS Bamboo AWS Plugin already and add new features and improvements more frequently going forward (we have scheduled several new Tasks for the upcoming months, amongst them support for Amazon S3).

Release notes

For more details about this release, please refer to the Tasks for AWS 2.0 Release Notes.