Last May, we wrote about our Aero configuration library. Given the usually contentious topic of configuration I’ve been surprised at how many of positive comments we’ve received about it. It’s funny how many of the most effective ideas in computer science are the simplest.

Aero isn’t less of a library, more an idea, which is to fully exploit the power of EDN, Clojure’s native data syntax. Part of that power come’s from EDN’s tag literals. Aero is simply a collection of tag literals that are useful in the configuration of software applications.

One of the suggestions in the article was to keep secrets in a separate file, which can be loaded into the final configuration via the #include tag. While that’s a valid answer to the problem of avoiding the publication of secrets in version control, it’s simply moving the problem elsewhere — secrets still have to live somewhere, and the problem still remains of how to distribute secret files and make them accessible to the application.

In this article I’ll demonstrate a simple tag literal that addresses the problem of managing secrets for applications deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

First, let’s first see the co

Infrastructure as code

Sometimes, it’s hard not to feel a little smug about the tech that we often take for granted in the Clojure community while the rest of the industry languishes under poor technology choices.

In his article, Using Pipelines to Manage Environments with Infrastructure as Code, Kief Morris presents a contemporary manifestation of a classic dichotomy: how to differentiate the same from the different.

This is a problem addressed in the seciont Multiple Environments.

Giant Onix versus Pikachu

spends more time than it took us to write Aero with an articulation of what seems a new problem: separating application configuration between environments