About BareMetal Tutorials

What is BareMetal?

"Bare metal" is what computer people often say when they mean a computer with nothing installed on it, not even an operating system.

This documentation contains rock-solid tutorials for bringing up enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure from exactly that, bare metal. We assume very little. The focus here is on the preeminent Public Cloud Provider, Amazon Web Services, AWS.

We will not judge you if you don't have an AWS Account yet. We'll get you started with that too. It's probably why you're here.

action

Whenever you're asked to do something like click or run a shell command, it'll be in an "ACTION" box like this.

A Quick Example

We mean it when we say we give you infrastructure-as-code for all the things. Not only that, we imbue them with secure-by-default best practices and convenience you've come to expect from modern-day kitchen appliances.

For example, here's some infrastructure-as-code from the tutorial and code for a Content Delivery Network, CDN. If you're building an enterprise, you'll definitely need a CDN for delivering static content like images or public data files.

This script happens to be written in TypeScript using AWS Cloud Development Kit, CDK. If you're not a CDK or TypeScript person, just scan the keywords. If you use the code we provide as-is, you only have to add some configuration for your enterprise (like your company domain name) to a simple configuration file. That's it.

  // Find the AWS DNS entry for your domain
  const hostedZone = HostedZone.fromLookup(this, "hosted-zone", {
    domainName,
  });

  // Create an SSL certificate for the CDN endpoint
  const certificate = new Certificate(this, "certificate", {
    domainName: cdnEndpoint,
    validation: CertificateValidation.fromDns(hostedZone),
  });
  // Set expiry notification
  certificate
    .metricDaysToExpiry()
    .createAlarm(this, "certificate-expiry-alarm", {
      comparisonOperator: ComparisonOperator.LESS_THAN_THRESHOLD,
      evaluationPeriods: 1,
      threshold: 45, 
    });

  // This is the CDN origin, where you copy resources
  const origin = new Bucket(this, "origin");

  // And finally pull everything together and make the CDN itself
  const distribution = new Distribution(this, "distribution", {
    domainNames: [cdnEndpoint],
    certificate,
    defaultBehavior: {
      origin: new S3Origin(origin),
    },
  });

Regardless of whether you're a TypeScript or CDK person, you will notice a few things.

Nothing is hard-coded, not even the domain or the CDN domain prefix.
You can see we create just the right SSL certificate with automatic verification that this is for a domain you own via the AWS DNS service, Route53.
And we'll let you know in plenty of time before that certificate expires with a custom alert.

Each tutorial includes infrastructure-as-code for deploying that tutorial's resources, written in AWS CDK. CDK has "stacks" as a fundamental that encapsulate a collection of related resources. There's at least one stack for every tutorial.

That means you can run the CDK to create the infrastructure in each tutorial without going through every detail and be pretty confident it'll work for you just like it did for us last time we ran it. Which was probably earlier today.

Get the code

If you're OK with Git and you have it installed already, clone the GitHub repo for this site. Otherwise we'll take you through it later.

git clone https://github.com/baremetalhelp/baremetal.help

You're going to need this repo to run any of the code we wrote for the BareMetal Tutorials. This documentation is also in the same repo under website.

Other Approaches

AWS CDK is not the only game in town and there are some good alternatives. We just like the idea of CDK and the language it's written in, TypeScript.

But let's be clear. The following are all widely-used and viable options with their own strengths and weaknesses. It's a matter of taste.

Approach	Background	Pros	Cons
Click-ops	We used to drive to the data center, plug wires in and edit configuration files. With public cloud providers' console access, clicking around in the UI is the equivalent.	Old-school familiarity.	Old-school fragility.
Terraform	Hashicorp Terraform is a general-purpose configuration syntax that can connect to variety of providers. It's billed as cloud-agnostic, but that's quite misleading.	It's widely used in existing enterprises for more than just cloud architectures. There's excellent tooling for maintaining Terraform infrastructure, including Terraform cloud.	Terraform uses collections of resources for each provider, like AWS and Microsoft Azure. Each defined resource is specific to an individual cloud provider, so the resource definitions for Amazon S3 and Azure Blob Storage have nothing to do with each other. Conditionals and loops can get messy because it's only a definition standard, not a full programming language. The definition syntax, HCL, is almost, but not entirely, unlike JSON ¹
AWS CloudFormation	This was the original configuration standard for AWS infrastructure. It used to be limited to JSON, which was very hard to maintain. You've been able to use YAML for a long time now and that's way better so you should go this route.	There is dedicated support in AWS for CloudFormation both as a managed service and in the console UI. The CloudFormation managed service maintains the state for you. The console can get a bit sticky with lots of stacks, especially nested stacks. But "A" for effort.	Whether it's JSON or YAML, some things are hard to do like conditionals and loops for the same reason as Terraform. It's just a configuration standard for defining values. Although it's YAML, the syntax for accessing some functions usually breaks IDE formatters.
AWS CDK, Cloud Development Kit	Realizing the limitations of purely-declarative CloudFormation — and noticing that the resource definitions of name/type/property triples are the same as programming languages — AWS created proper programming language bindings for CloudFormation resource definitions.	It's now a programming language, so type-checking, loops, conditionals, and so on are a breeze. You can use standard data-driven techniques to make the code fully parameterized. Although CDK itself is written in TypeScript there are bindings for many popular languages as well as several unpopular ones.	It's now a programming language, so you need to set up a development environment. It can be finicky getting compatible versions of dependencies and keeping them up to date. IDE's like VS Code have great support for TypeScript and have AWS integration.

Navigating BareMetal tutorials

First, "Set Up Your Environment" on the left walks you through creating an AWS Account and development environment. You'll need this to be complete whether you're just deploying the basics or the complete Enterprise Infrastructure.

The basics are simpler, self-contained stacks that provide functionality like a Content-Delivery Network.

Robust enterprises separate concerns. If you've done this kind of thing before, then you'll know about best practices such as network partitions between application servers and databases. In AWS, it is a best practice to limit the scope of any one AWS account. New accounts are practically free and there are good ways to organize them.

Use cases for separate AWS accounts include

Development, staging, and production deployments
Limiting secure access to sensitive data, like logs
Centralized billing

Nothing Special

There's already so much great documentation for all of the resources you can create in the public cloud. We don't duplicate it, and will cheerfully link to the best documentation along the way.

What we do provide, however, is infrastructure-as-code stacks for all the enterprise-grade infrastructure that you need to bring up in a bare metal AWS account that share common configuration. They are written in a way that lets you pick and chose what you want. The common configuration means that all your BareMetal stacks are consistent and compatible. Also, if you make a change, you can redeploy all the stacks and update everything with the new values.

We make it super clear when there are dependencies on other tutorials.

To-Do

note

BareMetal is not really a trademark. But "BareMetal is not really a trademark™" is.

Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ↩

About BareMetal Tutorials

What is BareMetal?​

A Quick Example​

Other Approaches​

Navigating BareMetal tutorials​

Nothing Special​

To-Do

Footnotes​

What is BareMetal?

A Quick Example

Other Approaches

Navigating BareMetal tutorials

Nothing Special

Footnotes