Bellerophon: Generate AWS CloudFormation templates from existing AWS resources

github.com

29 points·kiyanwang··5 comments

This looks like an interesting project, but what makes it different from the CloudFormer tool already provided by CloudFormation?

On a slight aside, among the many features I wish CloudFormation supported, one of the biggest is the ability to create a new stack and fold existing resources into it, including highlighting but allowing any discrepencies. If you didn't develop with CloudFormation from the beginning (or perhaps are migrating from Terraform) then having to move your environment "sideways" into a new stack can be pretty painful.

CloudFormer requires you to run an EC2 instance to get access to your environment. I never understood the reasoning behind that, other than least-common denominator within AWS.

Since they already publish a decent SDK and have decent APIs this approach makes much more sense to me - list your set of stuff via the API you're already using, then munger it into CFN format.

Take that temporary EC2 instance as a container just there for that half an hour to get the job done, they fix software installation, access rights etc. on behalf of you.

Is there a provider-agnostic (at least between AWS/GCP) option out there to do something similar?

On GCP, I'd like to convert running instances/existing resources to a Deployment Manager profile. Has anyone written a provider-agnostic descriptive language (maybe Hashicorp's Terraform works for this?) that can be translated to CloudFormation or Deployment Manager? (This seems like something Bitnami must have internally...)

Terraform if you're greenfield, but doesn't currently support creating configs from existing state.

No one has written a provider-agnostic language yet.

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