Today, we will be explaining how Commandeer allows you to manage multiple cloud systems by creating many accounts in the system. There are two different types of accounts in Commandeer. The first is a local account, which connects to LocalStack instead of directly to AWS. This let’s you run all your AWS services locally, if you still want to add tokens for Slack, Algolia, Sendgrid, Twilio, or other services you still can which makes it easy to run a semi-local environment for services that do not have a local representation. (Note: in the current release, version 0.6.0 you can’t edit your local environment, but in the next release you will be able to)

Mac/Windows/Linux App

Commandeer is a tool built by developers for developers that solves three things in the cloud. First, we are focused on the deployment of your IAC. Secondly, we enable you to ‘Test your Plumbing’. Lastly, Commandeer provides you the ability to easily view your data. (Manage AWS, Algolia, Slack, Twilio, SendGrid, Serverless, LocalStack, Ansible, Docker and more from your desktop) Download Now FREE in Beta — Available onLinux, Windows, and Mac

The second is an entirely cloud account. This allows you to connect to AWS, Algolia, Slack, etc. There are two different use cases that I have run across in this type of setup. The first is if you are running say development and production in the same AWS account but in different regions. You would either set this up as having an account called something like my-company-dev and my-company-prod where dev is in US West 1 and prod is in US East 1. You would then not need to switch between regions in the top section, but just switch accounts. Alternatively, you could just setup one account called say, my-company. And then switch between US West 1 and US East 2 in the top section. Both ways are valid, and it is more of a personal preference as to how you would like to operate. Also remember, there are a few services like IAM and S3 that are actually global, so the users, roles, groups, and S3 buckets will show up regardless of what region you select. Below you can see that I currently have it setup where dev and prod are one account, and I switch regions. The disadvantage of this setup is you have to memorize the region, and I will be changing it shortly because I want to run dev and prod environments of SendGrid and Twilio.

Viewing the commandeer and local accounts from the dropdown in Commandeer

You are looking at the development environment of Commandeer, you are getting un-sleepy

Why is it setup like that?

If you are a developer that works for multiple clients, or have multiple environments, this setup can be very helpful. Let’s say you use Dynamo, S3, Lambda, Algolia, and Sendgrid for a system you have built. You can then add an account called my-sweet-company-dev that uses keys to connect to aws, Algolia, and Sendgrid development accounts. You can also then connect your staging environment as another account named my-sweet-company-stg that has keys to a staging environment for AWS, Algolia and Sendgrid. With this setup, you could also then connect the same key to Slack, so that it can write messages to the slack channels of your choosing. This is nice as most companies have just one slack environment, but have multiple system environments. The third setup in this situation could then be my-sweet-company-local which if it is set to Local, it will point all AWS services to LocalStack to a copy of the AWS system. Unfortunately, many cloud services do not have such a sweet local world like AWS by the team at LocalStack, but not to worry, Commandeer can have a hybrid setup. So the localstack urls get defined, and then for Algolia and Sendgrid you could just point to the development environment with those keys. One note, for things that actually have data like Algolia, you will want to point to either a different account from dev, or point to the same one, but pre or postfix your indexes for example, if you have multiple indexes in Algolia, you can call them user-local and user-dev but have them in the same account.

LocalStack Monitoring Dashboard

Future Plans aka Product Roadmap

Commandeer is in beta mode currently. We believe that we will have our Version 1.0 launch in April. In order to have our system completely ready for action in corporate work environments, we want to setup a few things in terms of key management. The first is SSO’ing into your AWS Account on- demand, which means you will SSO in, get short-lived role access keys that are automatically placed into Commandeer. You will then be able to view a timer that counts down showing you how much time is left on the connection. We also plan on having full local encryption. This will allow you to use your own KMS keys within your account. Lastly, marking an account as production will then make the UI noticeably different, and have options to not store in local cache, etc.

Live Commandeer Demo in Venice, California — Thursday, March 5th at 7PM PST