New Amazon Infrastructure Automation Possibilities With Zapier

Infrastructure automation arrives on Zapier today in the form of four new Amazon integrations: Amazon EC2, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon CloudFront, and AWS Lambda.

Amazon EC2

For virtual servers in the cloud, Amazon EC2 has been a standard in the cloud computing world for years. Now with Zapier, you can automate instances whenever you need to. You can Trigger on a new instance, so you could be notified in Slack when new servers are created, or keep a spreadsheet for auditing purposes. And on the Action side, you can start or stop an Instance, which is most useful when used on a schedule, such as having a server switch on for a short time every night.

Triggers

• New Instance - Triggers when a new instance is created
• New scheduled event - Triggers when a new event is scheduled for one of your instances

Action

• Start or stop Instance - Starts or stops an existing instance

Amazon CloudWatch

Monitoring cloud resources is extremely important, especially setting up automations to do so. It can be difficult to get data out of Amazon CloudWatch, so you can use automations to set specific alarms should servers have complications. With Zapier you can now Trigger on New Alarm creation, and perform Actions to enable or disable alarms, and set an alarm state. Very useful for maintenance periods, or custom alert methods.

Triggers

• New alarm - Triggers when a new alarm is added
• Alarm state change - Triggers when the state of an alarm changes (e.g. from "OK" to "ALARM")

Actions

• Enable/Disable alarm actions - enables/disables the actions for a chosen alarm
• Set alarm state - temporarily sets the state of a chosen alarm

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront helps make the web faster for the end user, but that means that you have to tell them when your site is updated, which can be difficult. Now you can automate the process with two Triggers, one for New Distribution, and another for New Invalidation. On the Action side, you can invalidate an item, which works hand in hand with S3 bucket items that might be updated there.

Triggers

• New distribution - Triggers when a new distribution is created
• New invalidation - Triggers when a new invalidation is created

Action

• Invalidate item - invalidates a single item

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda. is currently in beta with Amazon, but is already extremely useful for the developer community. It allows you to run a piece of code on AWS without managing servers at all. The new automations allow you to Trigger on new functions, and perform Actions to invoke functions, such as running a function in response to a webhook.

Trigger

• New function - Triggers when a new function is added

Action

• Invoke function - invokes an existing function asynchronously

We hope you enjoy!