AWS PowerShell Lambda Build Environment for Docker

If you’re deploying an AWS PowerShell Lambda (which is PowerShell Core 6.0) in a build pipeline, you’ll likely come across the fact that the older PowerShell docker images don’t have Dotnet Core installed.

The .NET Core 3.0 .NET Core 3.0 SDK Docker images now contain PowerShell Core, but since AWS still uses .NET Core 2.1 which is in Long Term Support, you’re out of luck.

Therefore if you’re deploying your lambda from your CI pipeline using docker, then you need a build environment which has:

• PowerShell Core 6
• .NET Core 2.1
• AWS Tools for PowerShell

You’ve come to the right place. Here is a DockerFile you can use to build your Lambda deployment environment. Make sure you choose the AWS PowerShell Tools module you need in the last line:

An example of how you can build and use this image in a pipeline is below. I use Buildkite, so YMMV:

Sunscreen – Does it really help?

A large increase in melanoma has been experienced in countries where chemical sunscreens are in use. This has been seen in the last decade in places such as Australia where promotion of sunscreens has been ongoing. In 1992 Queensland had more incidences of melanoma per capita than any other place on Earth. ^[11]
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Launch Windows Server 2016 Nano in AWS with Powershell

Amazon Web Services yesterday announced they now have Amazon Machine images available for Windows Server 2016. This includes Nano Server, a perfect solution for a roll your own IaaS server to host your .NET Core APIs.

Windows Server 2016 Nano Server -A cloud-native, minimal install that takes up a modest amount of disk space and boots more swiftly than the Datacenter version, while leaving more system resources (memory, storage, and CPU) available to run apps and services.

One of the interesting things about Nano for existing Windows server users, is you can only access it via PowerShell/WinRM for managment of the server. You can quickly spin up a new instance of nano in your PowerShell console (already configured for AWS):

Once the instance has started up, you can get the Admin credentials using your EC2 Key, and establish a remote PowerShell session:

This leaves you with an established PowerShell session to the remote server, which can be shown as follows:
C:\> $session
Id Name ComputerName ComputerType State ConfigurationName Availability
-- ---- ------------ ------------ ----- ----------------- ------------
2 Session2 172.19.1.67 RemoteMachine Opened Microsoft.PowerShell Available

You are now able to invoke remote commands on your Nano server:
C:\> Invoke-Command -Session $session -ScriptBlock { Get-Process | Select ProcessName, Id |ft }
ProcessName Id
----------- --
amazon-ssm-agent 1792
csrss 496
EMT 1088
Idle 0
LiteAgent 828
lsass 556
services 544
smss 360
svchost 648
svchost 692
svchost 768
System 4
wininit 520
WmiPrvSE 1236
wsmprovhost 1468

If you just want to jump onto the remote server, you can Enter the Session:
C:\> Enter-PSSession -Session $session
[172.19.1.67]: PS C:\Users\Administrator\Documents> $StartTime = (Get-Date) - (New-TimeSpan -Day 1)
[172.19.1.67]: PS C:\Users\Administrator\Documents> Get-WinEvent -FilterHashTable @{LogName='System'; Level=2; StartTime=$StartTime}
| select TimeCreated, Message
TimeCreated Message
----------- -------
10/21/2016 2:36:36 AM Task Scheduler service failed to start Task Compatibility module. Tasks m...
10/21/2016 2:36:15 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 6 fail...
10/21/2016 2:36:15 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 0 fail...
10/20/2016 4:18:55 AM Task Scheduler service failed to start Task Compatibility module. Tasks m...
10/20/2016 4:18:48 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 6 fail...
10/20/2016 4:18:48 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 0 fail...
10/20/2016 4:14:42 AM Task Scheduler service failed to start Task Compatibility module. Tasks m...
10/20/2016 4:14:11 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 6 fail...
10/20/2016 4:14:11 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 0 fail...
10/20/2016 11:12:05 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 6 fail...
10/20/2016 11:12:05 AM The Virtualization Based Security enablement policy check at phase 0 fail...

[172.19.1.67]: PS C:\Users\Administrator\Documents> Exit-PSSession

Don’t forget once you are finished to remove the session:
Remove-PSSession -Session $session
 

Given that this instance has no local console, you will have to maintain and access it fully using PowerShell. Time to skill up on your PowerShell skills. If you would like to read more on remotely managing the instance, Microsoft have documented how to manage Nano Server. It’s a good next step to read.

Cloudformation stack creation – scripting via bash

Find yourself creating the same AWS Cloudformation stack a lot during testing?
Wasting too much time repeating typing in tags?

A simple post today with a quick solution.

Put your stack tags and parameters into json files and use this bash wrapper script to create the cloudformation stack. This script wraps the aws cloudformation create-stack command, but lets you create the stacks again and again with different names. The benefit is the parameters and tags are pre-defined. Thus this script will save you time if you are doing this from the AWS console regularly.

An example of running the script with parameters (that are ordinal on purpose):

create-stack.sh MockStack3 deploy/MockServices.template stackParams.json stackTags.json

Provide your own template file, and modify the stackParams and stackTags to your own needs. Below you’ll find the GitHub gist of the script and sample json files.

Tested on Bash in Windows 10 insider preview 🙂