Deploying Jenkins to AWS using cloudformation and secrets manager

Question

My objective is to build Jenkins as a docker image and deploy it to AWS Elastic Beanstalk.

To build the docker image I am using the Configuration as Code plugin and injecting all secrets via environment variables in the Dockerfile.

What I am trying to figure out now is how to automate this deployment using CloudFormation or CodePipeline.

My question is:

• Can I fetch secrets from AWS Secrets Manager using either CloudFormation or CodePipeline and inject them as environment variables in the deployment to Elastic Beanstalk?

Answer 1

Cloudformation templates can recover secrets from Secrets Manager. It is somewhat ugly, but works pretty well. In general, I use a security.yaml nested stack to generate secrets for me in SM, then recover them in other stacks.

I can't speak too much to EB, but if you are deploying that through CF, then this should help.

Generating a secret in SM (CF security.yaml):

Parameters:
  DeploymentEnvironment:
    Type: String
    Description: Deployment environment, e.g. prod, stage, qa, dev, or userdev
    Default: "dev"
...
Resources:
...  
  RegistryDbAdminCreds:
    Type: 'AWS::SecretsManager::Secret'
    Properties:
      Name: !Sub "RegistryDbAdminCreds-${DeploymentEnvironment}"
      Description: "RDS master uid/password for artifact registry database."
      GenerateSecretString:
        SecretStringTemplate: '{"username": "artifactadmin"}'
        GenerateStringKey: "password"
        PasswordLength: 30
        ExcludeCharacters: '"@/\+//:*`"'
      Tags:
      -
        Key: AppName
        Value: RegistryDbAdminCreds

Using the secret in another yaml:

Parameters:
  DeploymentEnvironment:
    Type: String
    Description: Deployment environment, e.g. prod, stage, qa, dev, or userdev
    Default: "dev"
...
Resources:
  DB:
    Type: 'AWS::RDS::DBInstance'
    DependsOn: security
    Properties:
      Engine: postgres
      DBInstanceClass: db.t2.small
      DBName: quilt
      MasterUsername: !Sub '{{resolve:secretsmanager:RegistryDbAdminCreds-${DeploymentEnvironment}:SecretString:username}}'
      MasterUserPassword: !Sub '{{resolve:secretsmanager:RegistryDbAdminCreds-${DeploymentEnvironment}:SecretString:password}}'
      StorageType: gp2
      AllocatedStorage: "100"
      PubliclyAccessible: true
      DBSubnetGroupName: !Ref SubnetGroup
      MultiAZ: true
      VPCSecurityGroups:
      - !GetAtt "network.Outputs.VPCSecurityGroup"
      Tags:
      - Key: Name
        Value: !Join [ '-', [ !Ref StackName, "dbinstance", !Ref DeploymentEnvironment ] ]

The trick is in !Sub '{{resolve:secretsmanager:RegistryDbAdminCreds-${DeploymentEnvironment}:SecretString:username}}' and !Sub '{{resolve:secretsmanager:RegistryDbAdminCreds-${DeploymentEnvironment}:SecretString:password}}'