AWS Workbench

What is AWS Workbench?

AWS Workbench is the first ArchOps environment for designing and deploying AWS Infrastructure.

AWS Workbench aims to solves the pain points observed in current cloud architecture design and deployment process like ;

Waterfallish handoffs between Architects and Cloud DevOps Engineers
Absence of What you see is What is Deployed (WYSIWID) view of infrastructure
Adhoc and obscure changes to infrastructure without communication to all stakeholders leading to surprises
Absence of singular view of cloud inventory leading to wastage of resources.
Decreased agility in deploying newer resources due to effort and ambiguity in translation of design to infrastructure code.

AWS Workbench provides:

A truly visual IDE for designing AWS infrastructure with auto-generation of deployment templates.
Best practices and patterns based development
Design level verification of cloud infrastructure blueprint
Accelerated communication between Architect and Cloud DevOps
Easy reusability and management

AWS Workbench features

Provides an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) using Eclipse Sirius to define cloud infrastructure, complete with navigation and drill down tools for ease of organization.
Auto-generates infrastructure code for AWS’s Cloud Development Kit with smart and secure default values based on AWS’s best practices.
Reduces the need for hand-written infrastructure code by about 80%
Supports generation of blueprints using AWS Solution Constructs as recommended by AWS’s Solution Architects.
Provides inbuilt support for commonly used AWS services
Enables clear separation of generated code and further manual customization.

Knowledge of Java language, working with Eclipse and installing plugins in Eclipse IDE is a pre-requisite.

Solution Architect level understanding of AWS services and ability to understand Javadocs is necessary for effective use of this tool.

AWS Workbench depends on multiple softwares and would need about an hour to set it all up.

Install following eclipse plugins in Obeo Designer

Clone this repository
Install AWS Workbench plugin from local zip . (Instructions on how to install eclipse plugins from zip file described here)
Start Obeo Designer and we are good to go