AWS AppConfig

Last updated on April 12, 2024

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Key Features
Benefits
Use Cases
Pricing
Reference

AWS AppConfig Cheat Sheet

AWS AppConfig allows software developers to quickly and securely adjust application behavior in production environments without needing to deploy code. It enhances the frequency of software releases, improves application resilience, and enables rapid response to emergent issues.

Key Features

Feature Flags: Allows gradual release of new capabilities to users and measures the impact of those changes before full deployment.
Dynamic Configurations: Enables updates to block lists, allow lists, throttling limits, logging verbosity, and other operational tuning to quickly respond to issues in production environments.
Validators: Ensures that your configuration data is syntactically and semantically correct before deploying the changes to production environments.
Deployment Strategies: Enables slow release of changes to production environments over minutes or hours.
Monitoring and Automatic Rollback: Integrates with Amazon CloudWatch to monitor changes to your applications. If a configuration change causes an alarm in CloudWatch, AWS AppConfig automatically rolls back the change to maintain the application’s health.

Benefits

Reduce unexpected downtime for your customers – AWS AppConfig helps to minimize application downtime by allowing you to establish rules for validating your configuration. Only valid configurations can be deployed. AWS AppConfig offers two methods for validating configurations:

- - Syntactic validation: This can be achieved using a JSON schema. AWS AppConfig uses this schema to validate your configuration, ensuring that any changes comply with the application’s requirements.
  - Semantic validation: AWS AppConfig can invoke an AWS Lambda function that you own to validate the data within your configuration.
Quickly deploy changes across a set of targets – AWS AppConfig streamlines the management of applications on a large scale by deploying configuration changes from a centralized location. Configurations can be stored in AWS AppConfig hosted configuration store, Systems Manager Parameter Store, Systems Manager (SSM) documents, and Amazon S3. AWS AppConfig can be used with applications hosted on EC2 instances, AWS Lambda, containers, mobile applications, or IoT devices.
Update applications without interruptions – AWS AppConfig implements configuration modifications to your targets during operation, eliminating the need for a complex build process or taking your targets out of service.
Control deployment of changes across your application – AWS AppConfig allows you to control the risk when deploying configuration changes to your targets by using a deployment strategy. Deployment strategies enable you to gradually introduce configuration changes to your fleet. If a problem arises during the deployment, you can revert the configuration change before it affects the majority of your hosts.

Pricing

With AWS AppConfig, you are charged only for the resources you utilize. The cost is determined by the quantity of configuration items logged, the count of active AWS Config rule assessments, and the number of conformance pack evaluations in your account. You have the ability to estimate your AWS AppConfig and architecture expenses in a consolidated manner using the AWS Pricing Calculator.

AWS AppConfig Cheat Sheet Reference:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/appconfig/latest/userguide/what-is-appconfig.html

Written by: Nestor Mayagma Jr.

Nestor is a cloud engineer and member of the AWS Community Builder. He continuously strives to expand his knowledge and expertise in AWS to foster personal and professional growth. He also shares his insights with the community through numerous AWS blogs, highlighting his commitment to Cloud Computing technology. In his leisure time, he indulges in playing FPS and other online games.