Introduction

Putting more Code into your Infrastructure as Code

Flying Circus is a tool for describing AWS infrastructure as code (using Python). It uses the same data structures as the AWS Cloud Formation service, except described as Python objects instead of the usual YAML. The Python program generates a YAML template, which is passed across to Cloud Formation in the usual manner.

It is a bit unusual to use a full programming language to describe infrastructure, instead of a static configuration file like many of us are used to (whether or not we also utilise a templating tool). We hope that the Flying Circus library can empower DevOps folk by unlocking some of the techniques that are available for software code, like named variables and techniques to structure code independently of the output format, libraries to allow code re-use with versioning, automated refactoring tools and so on.