AWS Control Tower - Replacing CodePipelines

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In this post I'm going to explain how I migrate the Control Tower AFT CodePipelines to GitHub workflows.

wait, why?

Simply, saving costs. Next are the monthly costs for updating 12 AWS accounts.

Service	Service total	December 2022	January 2023
VPC costs	$31.86	$30.36	$1.50
CodePipeline costs	$12.00	$2.00	$10.00
Key Management Service costs	$11.98	$5.99	$5.99
CodeBuild costs	$5.49	$3.54	$1.95

• VPC Costs: I described in my previous post how to reduce it through a custom flag.
• Code Pipeline and Codebuild costs: The main cost here is related to pipelines executions. We will dive into in the next section.
• KMS: Control Tower for AFT Cost for using the secrets created with Control Tower AFT

Pipelines

Account customization has two type:

• aft-global-customization in the repository learn-terraform-aft-account-customizations
• aft-account-customization in the repository learn-terraform-aft-global-customizations

Both are in the same CodePipeline model {ACCOUNT_ID}-customizations-pipeline:

There is one pipeline replica for each AWS account:

So, for updating all the accounts, all the pipelines should be executed.

Migrating to GH workflows

Let me first set the scope: I want to reduce the CodePipeline cost by executing GH workflows instead.

My initial approach is to create GH workflows in the global-customization and account-customization repositories to apply customizations to any account. This will work for created account, but if I create a new one that will still go through the CodePipeline.

Okey, let's start:

First, let me list the pipelines specs:

• aft-account-customizations
• aft-global-customizations

Both share a common structure:

• install: setup the environment variables for the execution and install the dependencies
• pre_build: execute a python script
• build:
  • build backend.tf and aft-providers.tf from the templates backend.jinja and aft-providers.jinja. jinja is language that combined with python simplify files templates filling, in this case, help us build those terraform files dynamically for each account.
  • terraform init
  • terraform apply
• post_build: execute a python script, useful for a post clean up actions

In order to keep it simple, I'm going to skip the pre_build and post_build part. Let's start:

First, I want to map all the accounts detail into JSON files as:

accounts/arepabank-dev.json

{
    "account_id": "114628476372",
    "env": "dev"
}

If we list those files and provide the to the strategy.matrix we can update multiple accounts at the same time.

Next is the main workflow code:

on:
  workflow_call:
    inputs:
      accounts:
        required: true
        type: string
      apply:
        required: false
        type: boolean
        default: false
env:
  # use GH secrets to store sensitive credentials
  AFT_ACCOUNT_ID: ${{ secrets.AFT_ACCOUNT_ID }}
  AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AFT_ROOT_EXECUTOR_AK }}
  AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AFT_ROOT_EXECUTOR_SK }}
  AWS_DEFAULT_REGION: ${{ secrets.AFT_ROOT_EXECUTOR_REGION }}
  TF_STATE_BACKEND_S3_KMS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.TF_STATE_S3_BUCKET_KMS_ID }}

jobs:
  deployment:
    name: ${{ matrix.account }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    environment: ${{ inputs.apply == true && matrix.account }}
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        account: ${{ fromJSON(inputs.accounts) }}  # accounts is an array with JSON files names
    steps:
    - name: Checkout
      uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: setup account properties
      env:
        ACCOUNT_FILE: "accounts/${{ matrix.account }}.json"
      run: |
        ACCOUNT_ID=$(jq '.account_id' $ACCOUNT_FILE -r)
        ACCOUNT_ENV=$(jq '.env' $ACCOUNT_FILE -r)

        # mapping ENV VARS from CodePipeline spec
        echo "EXECUTION_TIMESTAMP=$(date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "TF_DISTRIBUTION_TYPE=oss" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_REGION=$AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_BUCKET=aft-backend-$AFT_ACCOUNT_ID-primary-region" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_KEY=$ACCOUNT_ID-aft-global-customizations/terraform.tfstate" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_DYNAMODB_TABLE=aft-backend-$AFT_ACCOUNT_ID" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_KMS_KEY_ID=$TF_STATE_BACKEND_S3_KMS_KEY_ID" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        
        # BE SURE credentials have permission on the bucket
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_ROLE_ARN=" >> $GITHUB_ENV

        # BE SURE credentials can assume this role / or create a role
        echo "AWS_PROVIDER_ROLE_ARN=arn:aws:iam::$ACCOUNT_ID:role/AWSAFTExecution" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        
        # file paths
        echo "AWS_BACKEND_PATH=terraform/backend.jinja" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        echo "AWS_PROVIDER_PATH=terraform/aft-providers.jinja" >> $GITHUB_ENV

    - name: build aft-providers.tf and backend.tf
      run: |
        pip install Jinja2
        ./scripts/aft-providers-builder.py
        cat "terraform/aft-providers.tf"
        ./scripts/backend-builder.py
        cat "terraform/backend.tf"

    - name: Terraform Plan
      id: tf-plan
      working-directory: terraform
      run: |
        TF_PLAN_PATH="$GITHUB_WORKSPACE/accounts/${{ matrix.account }}.tfplan"
        echo "TF_PLAN_PATH=$TF_PLAN_PATH" >> $GITHUB_ENV
        terraform init
        terraform plan -out=$TF_PLAN_PATH

    - name: terraform apply
      if: ${{ inputs.apply == true }}
      working-directory: terraform
      run: |
        terraform apply $TF_PLAN_PATH 

The python code to build the .jinja file is:

#!/usr/bin/python3

import os
from jinja2 import Environment, FileSystemLoader


backend_path=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_PATH')
timestamp=os.getenv('EXECUTION_TIMESTAMP')
tf_distribution_type=os.getenv('TF_DISTRIBUTION_TYPE')
backend_region=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_REGION')
bucket=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_BUCKET')
key=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_KEY')
dynamodb_table=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_DYNAMODB_TABLE')
kms_key_id=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_KMS_KEY_ID')
aft_admin_role_arn=os.getenv('AWS_BACKEND_ROLE_ARN')

file_loader = FileSystemLoader('.')
env = Environment(loader=file_loader)

template = env.get_template(backend_path)

output_content = template.render(
    timestamp=timestamp,
    tf_distribution_type=tf_distribution_type,
    region=backend_region,
    bucket=bucket,
    key=key,
    dynamodb_table=dynamodb_table,
    kms_key_id=kms_key_id,
    aft_admin_role_arn=aft_admin_role_arn
)
output_filename = backend_path.replace(".jinja",".tf")

# to save the results
with open(output_filename, "w") as fh:
    fh.write(output_content)

You can check the other workflows and scripts to see how I integrated this in a PR workflow:

• 1-pr.yml
• 2-deploy-main.yml
• shared-tf-plan.yml
• shared-get-workspaces.yml
• backend-builder.py
• aft-providers-builder.py

About me

I'm a Software Engineer with experience as Developer and DevOps. The technologies I have worked with are DotNet, Terraform and AWS. For the last one, I have the Developer Associate certification. I define myself as a challenge-seeker person and team player. I simply give it all to deliver high-quality solutions. On the other hand, I like to analyze and improve processes, promote productivity and document implementations (yes, I'm a developer that likes to document 🧑‍💻).

You can check my experience here.

Personal Blog - cangulo.github.io GitHub - Carlos Angulo Mascarell - cangulo
LinkedIn - Carlos Angulo Mascarell
Twitter - @AnguloMascarell

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