Summary

If there’s one thing that should be clear, it’s that AWS provides many different ways to automate the same task. The specific services and approaches you should use are architectural decisions beyond the scope of this book, but you should at least understand how each of the different AWS services covered in this chapter can enable automation.

Fundamentally, automation entails defining a task as code that a system carries out. This code can be written as imperative commands that specify the exact steps to perform the task. The most familiar type of example is the Bash or PowerShell script system administrators write to perform routine tasks. AWS Systems Manager, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy use an imperative approach. Even the Userdata scripts that you use with EC2 Auto Scaling are imperative.

Code can also be written in a more abstract, declarative form, where you specify the end result of the task. The service providing the automation translates those declarative...