Introducing Kombustion: Kablamo's Open Source AWS Developer Tool

Kablamo has released its most significant open source project to date: Kombustion, an AWS plugin that adds an intelligence layer to AWS CloudFormation, reducing the time and complexity of managing cloud infrastructure at scale.

Tasks that previously took days or weeks can now be completed in minutes.

The problem it solves

AWS CloudFormation is powerful, but managing it across large environments means dealing with thousands of lines of YAML or JSON, and a lot of repetitive, error-prone configuration work. Every team that builds on AWS ends up solving the same problems repeatedly.

Setting up a new Virtual Private Cloud in AWS has typically required defining and managing up to 30 different AWS resources. With Kombustion, a best-practice VPC can be set up with a small amount of configuration to an existing plugin, with no manual resource juggling required.

How it works

Kombustion provides a plugin architecture that sits on top of CloudFormation. Teams define their infrastructure at a higher level of abstraction (what they want, not how to configure every underlying resource) and Kombustion generates the correct CloudFormation from that definition.

The plugin system is open and extensible. Teams can write their own plugins for patterns specific to their environment, or use community plugins for common setups.

Why open source

We built Kombustion to solve our own problems. We were managing AWS infrastructure across multiple client environments and the repetition was expensive, both in engineering time and in the bugs that repetition introduces.

We open sourced it because the problems we were solving weren't specific to us. Every team building serious things on AWS hits the same walls. Sharing the tool means the community can improve it, and we all benefit.

The source is available on GitHub.

Originally published on the Kablamo blog.