Organizational and developer workflows for assets as code?

Question & Answer
, ,
1

Does anyone else use Assets as Code to deploy QS resources using CloudFormation?

What does your organizational workflow look like?

What does your developer workflow look like?

Are there any recommendations or challenges you have faced?

Looking to learn as much as I can to define our own workflows and processes.

Thanks!

2

Hello @m0ltar, this is the kind of workflow I implement in regards to deploying QuickSight resources through Cloud Formation:

Use templates for dashboards and analyses and share those templates with the account you’re deploying to. When making changes to dashboards and analyses, create a new template and update your cloudformation with it, then share the new template with the destination account. Other assets can be fairly easily managed in cloudformation. The challenges: using definitions for analyses and dashboards is complexity and it is very prone to errors.

This is a bit of a simplified workflow, but I hope it helps!

1 Like
3

Use templates for dashboards and analyses

create a new template and update your cloudformation with it

Could you please elaborate on this. How do you do that?

Typically we begin by creating an analysis in the UI. But the template part is only available in the API, as I understand.

And the templates I’ve exported before thru the API, I think were not compatible with CF, as they use different case if I remember correctly.

Thanks.

1 Like
4

Hello @m0ltar, my team generates the template using the CLI and use the arn in Cloudformation for the analyses and dashboards. Here is some documentation with the syntax to declare it in your Cloudformation template.

5

Oh, I see. So you specify the template ARN in the CF template then?

But then you are effectively not managing most of it as code, or am I misunderstanding?

The code part would be only the CF template which defines the Analysis and Dashboard, but the meat & potatoes is the definition itself, which is then provided by the template, whish is not in code.

Am I understanding your setup correctly?

Thanks!

6

Hello @m0ltar, you are understanding that correctly!

You can manage the definition in Cloudformation, as seen in this documentation, but I would highly suggest not going that route.

The code required to fill out the arrays can get out of hand quickly and it is super error prone. Utilizing the template is a lot easier to manage and has worked great for my team!

1 Like