Waterbear Cloud is a flexible platform for Amazon Web Services (AWS). We promise Waterbear Cloud as a no lock-in platform, and we deliver on this by provisioning cloud resources in your own AWS accounts using standard CloudFormation stacks. The core of our platform is a configuration format which models complete AWS environments and an engine that consumes that model, provisions the defined resources and configures them. To further deliver on our promise of no lock-in we are releasing these core tools as open source.

Introducing AIM

AIM (Application Infrastructure Manager) is the name of the core tooling that we’ve built for Waterbear Cloud. The goal of AIM is to revolutionize Infrastructure as Code (IaC) projects by making how these projects are built and managed dramatically easier. Declarative configuration files replace the imperative design of typical IaC projects. Applications and networks are semantically described in configuration and can be provisioned into AWS environments and easily re-used between projects. Powerful per-environment configuration overrides make it easy to see exactly how each environment differs from each other. The AIM CLI orchestrates the management of CloudFormation stacks from this configuration and is built from the ground up to be multi-region and multi-account.

We’ve created the AIM web site that explains and documents this tool and released the full source code on github under the open source Mozilla Public License. Written in Python 3, AIM is distributed on the Python Package Index (PyPI) and can be installed with a single “pip install aim” command.

The current state and future of AIM

AIM is capable of building robust working environments. It allows for 100% automation of Infrastructure as Code projects, enabling you to create dev and test environments where your systems can be tested, then changes can be automatically replicated into production. AIM has already undergone numerous iterations, in particular the configuration file format has evolved many times and we believe is now able to describe a very wide range of use cases, for example, deploying an application to multiple regions and having simple per-region overrides.

AIM is new as an open source project and we still have many features and polish we want to add. We’ve started writing Quickstart Labs to introduce you to AIM, and documented the AIM project configuration file format, but have much more to do to make AIM as easy as possible to get started with. We encourage you to try out AIM, give us feedback, but also warn that building complete best practice AWS environments is not yet an out-of-the-box experience.

AIM with Waterbear Cloud

We built AIM with the goal of making Infrastructure as Code projects easier to manage and govern and believe we’ve accomplished that goal. Our Waterbear Cloud platform is built on AIM, but adds in complete best practice configuration for AWS environments along with our expertise as AWS consultants to meet your applications unique requirements, and your organization’s governance and compliance needs. Interested in making your AWS environments truly 100% automated? Think that such a solution is only for large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend? Take a look at our pricing page and we think you’ll find Waterbear Cloud is an amazing value for managing robust, reliable and secure AWS environments.