886: AWS and IAC for Dummies with SST

Wes and Scott talk about Infrastructure as Code and how SST makes deploying to AWS easier than ever. They dive into SST’s features, developer experience, and how it simplifies managing services like databases, email, and more. Plus, insights on Cloudflare integration, auto-scaling, and real-world use cases. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! Supper Club × Next.js on AWS + Serverless with Dax Raad 02:37 Brought to you by Sentry.io 04:52 Intro to SST config SST AWS 05:40 Overview of Scott’s SST config file 12:33 Exploring SST’s endless capabilities SST’s docs Cloudflare 15:42 The SST developer experience Infrastructure for TS Devs: Kubernetes, WASM and Containers with David Flanagan Supper Club × Flightcontrol with Brandon Bayer 19:05 SST console and GUI overview 22:13 Resource management and pricing 24:52 Secrets management 27:38 Tunneling and security https://sst.dev/docs/live 30:52 Simplifying DNS 35:18 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Aquaphor Healing Ointment Wes: Magnetic Picture Hanger Frame Shameless Plugs Syntax YouTube Channel Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  Welcome to Syntax. Today, we're going to be talking about Infrastructure as Code and AWS, Cloudflare, these types of things with something called SST. We had Dax Rad on the show a little while ago to talk about SST and some of the things he's been up to, but I hadn't gotten my hands dirty with it until now. And I've been deploying things on AWS with SST. And let me tell you, it makes it way easier than ever having to deal with AWS services. In fact, when I press deploy on what I'm working with, it modifies like 30 different things in AWS. And I don't have to know what those things are. I don't have to click through the GUIs. I don't have to get all my roles and all that stuff.

• 0:43Scott Tolinski?

  So we're going to be talking all about how you can utilize these skills to both deploy on AWS as well as anywhere that supports Terraform or Palumi, I believe it's called. If I pronounce that wrong, you can correct me. Either way, my name is Scott Tolinski. I'm a developer from Denver. With me as always is Wes Boss. What's up, Wes?

• 1:03Wes Bos?

  Hey, yeah, this, this sounds exciting. We had Dax on a long time ago. Probably like two years ago, just when this thing was just kicking off. And it seems like it is so much more mature and like obviously very usable right now. And this is, this is awesome because like a lot of people do want to be able to deploy to something like AWS, but it's just not worth, not worth the, the pain of, of having to do that type of thing. So like SST is, correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a, a way to configure your deployment architecture with code. So this is not something you build an, an app with,

• 1:44Wes Bos?

  but it's, it's a way to put all the pieces together, which is like servers and image storage and all that stuff.

• 1:53Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that's correct. In fact, it is basically like a nicer way to work with something like Terraform. Terraform is Infrastructure as Code. We've talked about that in one of our episodes about bare metal. That was like really super good where what you have with Infrastructure as Code is that you are defining the way that all of your services and all of these things fit together inside of a single config file. And SST is a platform using Palumi in.

• 2:24Scott Tolinski?

  Therefore terraform ideas, it's able to create all of those things behind the scenes. And it's not just AWS, like I mentioned, there's a whole bunch and we'll talk all about more of those. But hey, before we do that, let's talk about Sentry real quick because let me tell you, I've been deploying things on SST and I moved a site from one service to another service and I had my database over on Neon and I had my UI over here and it was all connected like you typically connect things. And then now that I moved this to SST, I have my databases and oh man, what are all of the different services called? I tell you, I've been learning more three-letter acronyms in the past week than anything else.

• 3:07Scott Tolinski?

  I actually, I think I had a Google one time that was like, should I do this with my VPC and RDS to S3 to EC2? Like it was just like speaking another language. It's ridiculous. So if you're moving all that kind of stuff around, you're getting into services or perhaps there's now private services in your own virtual private cloud that you need to connect and things aren't connecting. You want to make sure that you keep on top of all of that stuff. So use a service like Sentry at sentry.io/syntax, sign up and get two months for free using the coupon code TASTYTREAT. And let me tell you Wes, I needed it because I'm deploying an app that people are actually using.

• 3:47Scott Tolinski?

  I have like 800 users on this app and I need to make sure that these users know if this thing is, or I need to know if the app is breaking any kind of way, especially when you do such a major architectural change to this thing.

• 3:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah. And this is your Habit Path app?

• 4:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:03Wes Bos?

  And what was it previously on?

• 4:06Scott Tolinski?

  Coolify.

• 4:07Wes Bos?

  Coolify, okay.

• 4:09Scott Tolinski?

  In Coolify, there's no problem with Coolify. The thing is, is that my Coolify server is like a hobby server. It's for like hobby projects for me. And in fact, because of that, it's an ARM server and the only place that Hetzner has ARM servers is like overseas. So it's slow. It's slow where I am for a lot of reasons, but it's like for hobby projects. But like now that I got users on this thing, it's like. Okay, I gotta actually put it somewhere where it's gonna be more performant everywhere. So, yeah, I went A W S.

• 4:37Wes Bos?

  Plus a great excuse to learn how to deploy to AWS.

• 4:41Scott Tolinski?

  That's kind of my whole job, is finding excuses to F with things.

• 4:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah, to totally rip everything out, redo it, hit all the problems along the way.

• 4:52Scott Tolinski?

  Totally. So, okay, let's talk about it. We mentioned it's SST is infrastructure as code. Again, you're writing your code to define your infrastructure. That's pretty self-explanatory. But the nice thing about that is, is that you don't have to go through in what they call click ops and click here and click there. And let me tell you, on AWS dashboard, there's just about 800 billion things to click on. So, that was the hardest part for me, was like when I was like trying to figure out what was going wrong. I was like, alright, now I gotta click through these dashboards. Even though it was a user error on my part, I was like, I'm gonna see if I can dive into AWS's dashboards and figure out what I did wrong here. Or like, open up groups, or try to route things. And it's like, the end of the day, I needed to nuke my SST config and start over because I was just too green.

• 5:36Scott Tolinski?

  I didn't know what I was doing enough. So, yeah, we'll talk a little bit all about that. So, either way, you define all of the services in your app in a single config. And I'll show you my config here. And this config file can be very big, it can be very small, depending on how many services you have. And I'll collapse some of this stuff so you can see what's important here. For this config, I am hosting a number of things. The config that is on the screen right now, I'm not gonna explain the code too much. But, I'm hosting an email service with, was it, simple email service or something? I don't know, all the acronyms.

• 6:11Wes Bos?

  SES, yeah. SES is simple email service, yeah.

• 6:14Scott Tolinski?

  Correct. Okay, so I'm hosting email with SES, I'm hosting my sync server for my Xero Local First platform. I'm hosting that with an EC2 cluster. I am hosting a UI with Lambda via the SvelteKit Lambda adapter. I did have an S3 bucket in here for database backup or replica backups at some point. I'm not doing that anymore. It was too complex for me when I was getting started.

• 6:39Wes Bos?

  The Xero schema thing, that is a... Like a Linux image or how does that run?

• 6:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's a Docker container. So the first part about it here is we have our app config. Inside of our app config, you just give your app a name. You can give it different stages. So like I can have totally separate production and staging infrastructure. So that way I can manage all of that with only completely separated production user and a staging user. I'm also using Cloudflare and I'm able to run some commands. I'm choosing what region it is and I'm just declaring that it's an AWS provider that I'm using for many of these things. And then you have essentially a run function in your config. And this run function is where you define all of your different services. So one cool thing about this config is that it's TypeScript. It's a TypeScript file.

• 7:29Scott Tolinski?

  So I can do straight up JavaScript in here. So for instance, I needed to load a JSON file and pass it into an ENV variable for zero schema. So I'm doing all of that just in straight up JavaScript, reading a file and loading it into an environment variable. So we can ignore that because it's not SST related. Here's where the good stuff starts. So I have a VPC configuration. I'm creating my own virtual private cloud, right? You could think of a virtual private cloud as being like a, this is an AWS thing, but you could think of it as being like a a grouping of related services that need to talk to each other, but privately. And some of these services can become public, but like things like your database

• 8:12Scott Tolinski?

  or you know, the sync server, I don't necessarily want those to be public in that way where I want the UI to be able to connect to them, right? But I don't want users outside of my VPC to connect to the database. Got it? So you have your own virtual private cloud, so you create that. Then you, in this case, for my container, for my zero sync stuff, I am creating an ECS cluster. And I'm passing in my virtual private cloud. I'm giving it some just like additional settings, which are not things we need to worry about here. But so you create the cluster, you create the VPC. Here I'm creating a database. So I'm using their Postgres helper. Here, which is just, oh dear gosh, what is the database service?

• 8:56Scott Tolinski?

  It's so funny. I've been running through these acronyms in my head.

• 8:59Wes Bos?

  RDS.

• 9:00Scott Tolinski?

  RDS, my God. I'm so close to all this stuff and I've been in it for so deep. It's just cycling in my brain. So either way, I'm creating an RDS database with this Postgres helper, naming the database, passing into my virtual private cloud, giving it a name. I do have some additional transform parameters to do things like logical replication that I need for zero. I got all this config straight out of zero, so you typically wouldn't have to do any of that stuff. And then I can even pass it in my dev, dev information. So in a dev thing, what this is going to do is it's not going to connect out to AWS for this database. It's just going to, when I'm in my development environment, it's going to utilize the local username password database.

• 9:41Wes Bos?

  Your local Postgres, yeah.

• 9:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 9:42Wes Bos?

  Oh, that's cool. And, and you can like turn that on and off? Like if you don't provide a dev, then it's just gonna connect to remote?

• 9:51Scott Tolinski?

  It's going to connect to a remote AWS. That's not your production. I wanted a local database here that I could like goof with and make sure I'm doing things correct. And we'll talk about this, this interpolate in a little bit, so we can ignore that. We'll talk about the secret in a little bit. I just want to show you all the services I have. We also have my zero sync service, which we talked about as being a Docker container. So I use the cluster add service. I give it an image. I give it a dev command. I pass it in load balancer things, and then I even define a domain for it. I'll talk a little bit more about domains and how that all works in just a little bit. And then I give it some env variables and that gets my zero server sync container set up. Next, I am having an email service, so a simple email service.

• 10:36Scott Tolinski?

  Again, this, this gets it all, all going. That's it. This is the only line I need. And now I have email ready. Now granted, I had to get the email approved. I had to apply for things on Amazon's dashboard, but this is it. It's essentially three lines of code where you just define SST AWS email. Give it a name for the service. Give it a sender. Bingo bango. Now you've got email in your app.

• 10:59Wes Bos?

  You're saying it gives you email. Does that mean it just simply gives you like SMTP credentials or?

• 11:07Wes Bos?

  Like it's not setting up any sort of like client to actually send the emails, right? It's just the the actual connection to it.

• 11:14Scott Tolinski?

  Well, we'll talk about that.

• 11:17Scott Tolinski?

  Because SST, we've talked a lot about it as infrastructure as code, right? But there's also runtime code associated with SST. Now, I'm not using any runtime code to send email from SST or AWS. I am just using the SMTP credentials. But many times what you're doing is in your runtime code, you're actually pulling in your SST resources.

• 11:37Wes Bos?

  Oh, OK.

• 11:38Scott Tolinski?

  Or using AWS specific packages to connect to your SST resources to then send the email. So that way, everything stays really like tight, right? I didn't want to do that for a number of reasons, so I'm just using SMTP. But yes, you can get in runtime as well. The website is just using the SvelteKit adapter. There's adapters for everything, which I'll show you in a bit. But we do this neat thing where we're linking a database. We add our VPC. I give it a domain and then that is that. And then there's a little dev command that can run as well that just runs DrizzleKit Studio in my dev environment as well. So this is my SST config file. It's pretty big.

• 12:19Scott Tolinski?

  This file could be really just as small as a website if you just had this one SvelteKit thing and that's it, right? It could be that small. But you know, it can also be big and host a ass ton of stuff, that's for sure.

• 12:33Wes Bos?

  That's good. And there's there's probably parts of SST that you you didn't use as well, right? Like you mentioned S3, right? But like what other services do they have? Let's take a look at the docs.

• 12:46Scott Tolinski?

  Well, let me tell you, Wes, the answer is that it's pretty much endless. And it's crazy because this uses Terraform. And because of that, there's like a ton of stuff. But even like as far as like the UI stuff, like let's say we have the SvelteKit site. They have getting started docs for Bun, NUC, Solid, Auth, Dino, TRPC, Hono, Astro, email, remix, Svelte, Drizzle, Prisma, and NextJS, Analog. I mean, I just keep going. There's they they have docs for everything on here. They knocked this out of the park, these docs. So there's an endless amount of services, especially for like getting started. But if you really get into the components, this is where things get nuts. So if you click on components and then AWS on their doc site, it can do anything. You know, EFS, BUS, VPC, task, cron, auth, nuc. I mean, it can do everything.

• 13:30Wes Bos?

  Oh, man.

• 13:31Scott Tolinski?

  It's just endless.

• 13:32Wes Bos?

  Just AWS alone, there's 39 different.

• 13:36Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe even more than that.

• 13:36Wes Bos?

  Like services. I counted them, so there is thirty-nine.

• 13:40Scott Tolinski?

  Did you count the ones under internal as well?

• 13:43Wes Bos?

  Uh, oh, no. No, I didn't.

• 13:45Scott Tolinski?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 13:46Wes Bos?

  That's just AWS, and then internal is... Oh, man, yeah, yeah. Man, AWS is just... What a huge freaking

• 13:54Scott Tolinski?

  Bro.

• 13:54Wes Bos?

  monster of a, of a service. It's just, it's so huge. Like, when you think about all the different little services that they provide.

• 14:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and then so also you can do CloudFlare stuff with this too. KVD1, Workers, Bucket, all of that stuff. You can do a ton of stuff. And there's not just that, Wes. There's 150 providers that work with SST. So you could think of AWS as one provider. You could think of as CloudFlare as another provider. And then there is more than, what, 150 other ones? In fact, there's a whole directory of different providers that you can use to essentially configure your infrastructure. You can even create things like Stripe products directly from your SST config. So it's not just AWS. It's not just CloudFlare. It is endless amounts of things.

• 14:48Scott Tolinski?

  It's pretty insane, yeah.

• 14:50Wes Bos?

  That's because of Terraform and Palumi?

• 14:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's, it's based on, I think it's built using Palumi, which uses the Terraform spec. Man, I am like, not the right person to get deep into that because

• 15:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 15:05Scott Tolinski?

  I, I'm so new to some of this stuff, but when I was looking at it, it uses Palumi, which... So Palumi is infrastructure as code in any programming language. It's an open source project, and SST uses all this open source stuff. So this is really kind of the backbone for a lot of this stuff. And it's why it all works as infrastructure as code. And it's a cool project. I didn't really know anything about it. I heard of Terraform, obviously, but not Palumi. But yeah, you can configure all of this stuff inside of your SST config. Again, it's your entire infrastructure. It's pretty incredible. Let's talk a little bit about the developer experience here.

• 15:48Scott Tolinski?

  Because the dev mode is something that you can run. And in fact, let me pop open my term. Okay, so we run, for me, it's PNPM SST dev, but it's typically just SST dev. And you can see that it tells me my app and it does all this stuff automatically. It's giving me my, my zero sync server you can see is up and running. My functions are up and running. It has my DrizzleKit Studio. You can see it has the tunneling here. HabitPath, my HabitPath Postgres and my HabitPath SvelteKit Adapter. And it has all this stuff up and running. And at this point, I can just load up my site.

• 16:21Wes Bos?

  For the audio listener, Scott has a terminal running. And it's like this little GUI in the terminal where he's switching between all of these different resources. And you're, you're clicking on them as well?

• 16:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I can click on it.

• 16:36Wes Bos?

  Can you, is, can you click on things in the terminal?

• 16:39Scott Tolinski?

  This is whatever this is, Wes. I don't know what this is. And it's not ghosty because ghosty has not great, you know, like Warp has really good click functionality. Ghosty doesn't. It has like, so whatever he built this in, you can, you can click in this, so.

• 16:52Wes Bos?

  Cool.

• 16:53Scott Tolinski?

  So either way, yeah, I got all my dev services up. I mean, it's like, you don't have to worry about like, it's like running all your services like you would if you were using something like Docker, right? Here's my app. It's up and running right here. So, pretty nice.

• 17:06Wes Bos?

  That is really cool. I imagine that would be really handy for scaling up and being able to define what happens when the resources start to get limited, right? We had David Flanagan on episode 746 and he talked about something's kind of similar to this where he's like really into Kubernetes. And he does all of that architecture of the Kubernetes with TypeScript files. And it is absolutely wild, the stuff that he was talking about. And he was kind of explaining how to handle the different traffic spikes. Is that something that's? Doable in here, I would imagine, right?

• 17:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, there's all kinds of, you can, you can configure literally everything about your, your hosting. And I've, I've only ever deployed AWS with it, so I don't know what it's like in other platforms. In the past, I had this replication manager from the zero sync docs. And yeah, you're giving it the, the CPU and the memory and all that stuff. But I would have to imagine, it wouldn't be too difficult to set up auto scaling or any of that stuff inside of here. Not something I've done, but your entire infrastructure is defined in here to the point where you're only really getting into the AWS console to set up user accounts and IAM rules and stuff like that.

• 18:24Wes Bos?

  And I'm trying to like, like compare this against other things like Flight Control. We had them on the podcast as well, where Flight Control is like a, it's a service that you pay for. And then that service connects to your own AWS account. That service has like a GUI and you can hook it up to Git and it will deploy. And you can, you can use it for AWS Lambda, you can use it for databases, job scheduling, background workers, things like that. It's, it's just for AWS. It kind of gives you that like Versal experience, but with your own, with your own AWS account. Does SST have something like this as well?

• 19:08Wes Bos?

  Like if you want to like say, okay, what am I using?

• 19:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 19:11Wes Bos?

  What's the approach to that?

• 19:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You, you mean like in terms of like, what am I actually deploying right now? What's the GUI for that look like?

• 19:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Wes Bos?

  And my other question to that is, is, is there also like a CI built into this?

• 19:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, well, I got all those answers in more.

• 19:30Wes Bos?

  All right.

• 19:31Scott Tolinski?

  Let me pull up my SST console. So in addition to your, your, your scaling question, Wes, yes, there is, I just was on the, this is the VPC. This might be the VPC, this is the cluster, the EC, whatever, this is the cluster. Either way, scaling is a thing you can set up to be, you know, auto scaling, give it min and max values for things.

• 19:55Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 19:56Scott Tolinski?

  Memory utilization, that kind of stuff. So yeah, you can set up auto scaling directly in here.

• 20:00Wes Bos?

  So when it hits more than 50% CPU, it scales up another one to a maximum of however many you've set.

• 20:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, so that brings, it's a good time to bring in the console here. So like you mentioned, like, what is the GUI for this type of thing? You get access to this. Now, this does become a paid product at some point. I would imagine, when I was looking at the, what does it take for this to become a paid product? It's not anything that I'm close to hitting. So I haven't really looked too much at it, but it was really reasonable. And what this is, again, is this is exactly what you're asking about. So within this, you can see all of the services that you're using. And if you've ever been like, you know, how many things is this actually configuring and using? I mean, just like scroll through all of this stuff. And this is all of the stuff this is having to deal with and configure. It's pretty mammoth, right?

• 20:48Scott Tolinski?

  So this is everything that I'm using just for that one app, which is why AWS is tough. And it's neat. So you get all kinds of things. You get logs, so you can get the logs for both your, any of your processes that have them. So my lambdas for my SvelteKit site or my ZeroSync service. You get logs, you get issues, actually, which are interesting. It's kind of like a Sentry Mini. You can see I need, clearly need a 404 page because a lot of people are looking for WP login on my site right now.

• 21:20Wes Bos?

  The bots.

• 21:21Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and it's hitting a 404 and giving me an error. So that's like kind of funny. You get things like that. You can get the UIs for your updates. You can check your deploys. And as far as auto deploying go and things like that, you can connect it directly to a GitHub repo. So I do have mine connected to my GitHub repo and I do have auto deploy. So anytime I push to a specific branch, it does do an auto deploy for me without issue. And one of the cool things that we haven't necessarily talked about is environment variables and how you connect your app and all those kinds of ways. It ends up being really nice and simple to the point where I only have one environment variable defined in like, in ClickOps here where I'm pasting it into this UI. I only have one single environment variable, even though I'm using a ton of them.

• 22:05Scott Tolinski?

  And I'll show you a little bit why in just a second here. But this is the GUI for it all and it's fantastic. And they've done a really great job with this.

• 22:13Wes Bos?

  So the pricing is based on active resources. So anything, anything over 350 active resources is charged at 8.6 cents per resource. So what, how many resources do you have for, for your app here?

• 22:33Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, man, that's a great question. So many resources, but not that many.

• 22:39Wes Bos?

  But like, like, what's, what's a resource?

• 22:41Scott Tolinski?

  Um, every single one of these little things is a resource.

• 22:43Wes Bos?

  Okay, so.

• 22:44Scott Tolinski?

  So like, um, clearly, like, when you have this, you know, it sets you up with, uh, I, yeah, I don't even know what half this stuff is. If I'm being entirely honest, I'm so, I'm such an SS, or I'm such an AWS noob.

• 22:56Wes Bos?

  SK CDN SSL. That's a SSL certificate.

• 23:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. Uh, this is like a CloudFlare zone look up. Um, there, it sets you up with, um, like a, what's it called? CDNs and all that stuff for you with CloudFront.

• 23:11Wes Bos?

  And what you're scrolling through right now is a list of all the resources that are used in. These seem like, like functions or just like, like helpers?

• 23:21Scott Tolinski?

  They're like microservices here.

• 23:23Wes Bos?

  For all the different pieces?

• 23:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, like the SST certificate, SSL validation.

• 23:27Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 23:28Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, it's, it's all that stuff.

• 23:29Wes Bos?

  So how many, how many are you using here?

• 23:33Scott Tolinski?

  Uh, is there, does it give you just a straight up number?

• 23:35Wes Bos?

  This is a relatively large app, right? You have, you have a front end, you have a back end, you have a database.

• 23:39Scott Tolinski?

  It's a sync server. I have an email service. That's a great question. I don't know how to, other than just by like, straight up counting them, which will take forever here. Um, I would say, looking at this, it's probably less than a hundred.

• 23:50Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it looks like it. Okay.

• 23:52Scott Tolinski?

  Maybe more than 50. Yeah, maybe around 50 something. Who knows? Um, but again, I haven't, I haven't gotten to that limit yet, so I haven't even thought about it. And this is all I need. So like, now that I have this, I'm like, good, I'm golden. I don't need anything else for this.

• 24:05Wes Bos?

  Yeah, even just like, if you were to think about, if you had three times that, that'd probably be 25 bucks a month. And if your app was three times more complex than it would be, then you probably are okay with spending 25 bucks a month because,

• 24:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Wes Bos?

  versus like, using a platform as a service, you're probably looking at, at hundreds, right? That's always the trade off with using AWS, right? It's hard, but it's much cheaper.

• 24:35Scott Tolinski?

  That's exactly correct. And so like getting into this stuff has been really great because I do feel like AWS is not something I necessarily have the time to get a degree in. You know, so for me, being able to work through a config like this is something that has been really nice for me. Let's talk about a little bit more. I mentioned that like I don't have to use a lot of environment variables inside of like click ops or copying and pasting them or anything like that. Or even in my dev environment, I'm not having to use that a lot because SST allows you to do some things here. So for instance, like I have my auth secret and that auth secret is defined as an SST secret. Now I set this via the command line once and then I'm able to access this auth secret just with a new SST auth secret, right?

• 25:20Scott Tolinski?

  I'm able to access that in my infrastructure. And likewise, the database, let's say I did need the database connection string, which I did. I can use the database variable that comes from my Postgres definition. And then I can use this interpolate to pull out all of the values out of it and then turn it into a connection string if I need it. Which I did because I do use environment variables in my code. And then later on, let's say in my website, I can pass in that connection string that's generated from SST. And remember, my SST config had a dev database and it had a production one. So I don't have to fuss with a dev env and a production env. It's just going to use my dev database and my local one.

• 26:02Scott Tolinski?

  And likewise, if I want to pull from a .env, I can just use process .env in this file and it will pull directly from my .env. But again, like other things can come directly from that like secret value I created. You can do just straight up JavaScript in here. So I can say, oh, hey, from my sync server, when I'm in production, use the service URL that it created. But in local, use the local host URL. So, you know, super nice there. So again, you're defining a lot of this stuff in this single file and you're able to use it passing into your app, all that stuff. But there's also like more like runtime code stuff and I didn't use a whole lot of this. So I'm just going to paste this down here for people who are watching. You can, there's SST.

• 26:45Scott Tolinski?

  Runtime things. So the code I'm showing on the screen and I'll talk through it is using S3 to upload files. And what they're able to do is from the SST package, they're able to import resource. And then they're able to access the current bucket with resource, my bucket, and then dot name. And then all comes directly from your SST config. So therefore it will work in dev, it will work in prod, it will work in staging. Even if those buckets are all different locations necessarily. And it works super well directly with the AWS S3 client, but you can do this with any of your resources. Especially things like oftentimes they'll recommend using the SST config to pull out the database credentials, right?

• 27:27Scott Tolinski?

  Or the email credentials or those types of things because they're being defined as the infrastructure. So you can use SST in runtime as well. So it's not just like config and let it rip, you know? Yeah, so it's really pretty sweet and we did mention like the tunneling aspect. But like one thing that I had a big problem with me personally, I'm so used to having like, oh, I just have a connection string for my database. I pass it my IP to approve my IP and then I can connect to it from my local one. And you know, make sure that the migrations I did or whatever is the data is where it's supposed to be. And I had such a problem with that, Wes. I had such a problem with with the private resources in a VPC. Like, how the hell do I connect to this stuff? How do I make sure the data is there?

• 28:08Scott Tolinski?

  And what I was able to do was I was able to do an SST shell. And then you have access like shell access to your database that I could run a PG restore and stuff like that on my database. While connecting to the production one without having to expose that production database to the general public.

• 28:25Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 28:27Scott Tolinski?

  Which which freaks me out, right? If you click those buttons, it's like make this public and have no IP restrictions and stuff like that. And it should freak you out, but it freaks me out. So being able to tunnel into that is super nice.

• 28:38Wes Bos?

  Cautious amount or a healthy amount of caution is always good when when exposing things to the internet.

• 28:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, no kidding. But yeah, this is SST and you know what? It is one thing I gotta say, if you're like watching this and you're like, this all looks interesting to me. I feel like I could do this. Maybe I'll actually have a YouTube video. Yeah, I think that's a good idea to put out a YouTube video at the same time we release this. That shows you maybe walking through some of this stuff. But I will say that the developer docs for SST, the biggest round of applause for everybody involved in creating these docs, because they are good. They're very good. And they walk you through not only like things you might want to do, but I gotta say, as somebody who's an AWS noob, when I went to the how to setting up your AWS accounts,

• 29:30Scott Tolinski?

  and it tells you to create management accounts, create staging and production accounts, create all these different IAM credentials and interfaces and stuff like that. You create all of these things and these docs walk you through it. They hold your hand like I'm holding my daughter's hand crossing the street. It is like I feel so secure reading these docs because everywhere it tells me to click. I click these darn things and they're there. I don't know how many times that like happened to you where it's like, click the getting started button and there's no getting started button.

• 29:59Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Shout out to everyone involved in these docs because they're fantastic and they will walk you through all of this stuff.

• 30:06Wes Bos?

  I'm that kind of same idea. I remember we had Brian Leroux on and he was working on Begin. And part of what they did is you would just create an initial IAM that had access to everything. And then you give it that and then it goes and creates all this stuff for you. Does that work the same? Does this work the same way?

• 30:27Scott Tolinski?

  You know, I'm not, I'm not going to say yes to that because I don't think so. And the way I did is I did have to create all the IAM Identity Center stuff. I had to do all that. I don't know if this does that and it might. You know, maybe Dax can answer that for us. There's a good chance it could because it does so much other things. I don't want to say it doesn't, but I did it by hand and it wasn't that tough. Just because this walk you through it and you just like click here, do this, whatever, and you're all set up. One thing that I didn't mention that I do want to say is really dope about this, Wes, is that I gave it my CloudFlare in an environment variable, my CloudFlare API keys and stuff.

• 31:03Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Scott Tolinski?

  And by doing that, In my config, I just specify a domain property. I give it my domain name. And then, well, this is just saying for production, use Cloudflare as a DNS. And I gave it this override true because it was having some issues creating and recreating it. But this goes through Cloudflare and updates your DNS for everything. For subdomains, for domains, updates your DNS, gets all the everything going for you. And it did also the same, uh, same thing. Well, I guess it didn't do the same thing for me. I had to do some click ops for that. But like for my domains, for whatever it was, my subdomains or normal domains, it took care of all that for me. And I gotta say, that's pretty dope. I didn't have to think about it. It just created the domain record for me and I went there.

• 31:46Scott Tolinski?

  And at some points when I was getting this going, because I didn't want to take HabitPath offline while I was working on this, I had another domain pointing to it. And it was easy as just changing this domain here. Next thing you know, it's working. So.

• 31:57Wes Bos?

  That's great.

• 31:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:59Wes Bos?

  I always love that because there's always one little piece where you accidentally forget one little thing like, ah, that, that's still a click, click ops thing right now. Like, all right, now I have, um, I'm working with my Cloudflare cache rules. And the cache rules are done via the GUI in the dashboard. And I'm sure you can like do something like this where you can, you can replicate it in code. Um, and that would be kind of nice, but like, I, I didn't feel like diving into it. But I know that when I go to move it to the production domain name, I'm gonna forget.

• 32:38Scott Tolinski?

  Just something, who knows what.

• 32:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Scott Tolinski?

  One thing I just kind of glossed over a little bit was this link. When I showed you the SST and the runtime stuff, uh, that's where this comes into play here. So if I wanted to access the database credentials on the server of my SvelteKit site here, I guess it's a LAN bed, it's not the server. If I wanted to access my database resource, I have to link it. So anytime you have a resource that you want to make available in another resource, you just link it and that's it. So pretty nice and simple. Works super well. I, I have no issues with that whatsoever. And yeah, I gotta say, for somebody who's avoided infrastructure as code, mostly because you go to, you, you, you think like, this is a good idea, right? This, this sounds like a good idea. I'm sold on it. And you go to Terraform's docs and you're just like.

• 33:24Scott Tolinski?

  I don't want to do that. Like, every, everything I wanted out of it is just like, I don't feel the need for it anymore.

• 33:30Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Well, there's a reason why that's, like, infrastructure is an entire career in itself, right? Just, just doing all this stuff. And it's quite amazing that, like, us lowly JavaScript developers can now, like, architect some major infrastructure.

• 33:48Scott Tolinski?

  It is. And I feel very powerful with this because I feel like, like I said, you know, I, typically, me personally, we've talked about hosting databases and stuff like that. You know, I'm opting to use something like Planetscale or Neon, or, you know, like a paid managed service. Now I gotta, now I gotta keep track of another billing and another service, where with this, I can fire up a database directly. I can have any type of database I want. I can have it available in my application, and I can do it in absolutely no time with like a couple liners in a config. And to me, that is very powerful. Yeah, it's very, very powerful. So, yeah, I'm pretty sold on SST as a platform. And again, it's not just AWS, it's 150-plus providers, including Cloudflare, if you want to deploy things to Cloudflare,

• 34:32Scott Tolinski?

  or products on Stripe, or that type of thing. And it's, it's really pretty, pretty sick. So, a shout out to the, everybody involved in SST DAX, and, you know, anybody who's working on this. Also, what's interesting, Wes, is I don't know if they're currently using this, but in the console of SST, they're either going to or currently using ZeroSync. I think they were using Replica before. So, I'm deploying a ZeroSync app in a console that's built with ZeroSync, and it's pretty sick. Yeah.

• 35:01Wes Bos?

  That's sweet. Right on. Well, thanks for laying it down. I'm certainly gonna give that a shot on my next project, because I think it'd be kinda neat to deploy it like this.

• 35:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, big, big fan. So, yeah, that's all I got. Any, any other questions? Or are you, you good?

• 35:17Wes Bos?

  That's it.

• 35:18Scott Tolinski?

  Cool. Well, let's get into sick picks and shameless plugs, things that we like that are sick, things that we want to plug that are shameless. Wes, do you have any sick picks or shameless plugs today for us?

• 35:30Wes Bos?

  I do. It's right here. These are something that my wife found, and I think it's really cool. Can you guess what it is? It's two pieces of wood that connect with magnets.

• 35:43Scott Tolinski?

  Is it for drying things?

• 35:46Wes Bos?

  Uh, no, although you could, I'm sure you could do that. So what it is, is it's actually a picture frame.

• 35:51Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 35:53Wes Bos?

  Picture frames are one of the most obnoxious things in the world because they're either the worst quality ever. Like even Ikea picture frames have gotten so awful over the years. Or it costs a million dollars to frame something. And, and sometimes you just have something that's nice that you wanna hang up. Um, and my wife found these where it's two pieces of like teak wood. And they connect to each other with magnets. Um, and you can get them in different lengths. You can cut them down to the actual size of the picture that you're hanging. And you just put one at the top and one at the bottom. And then you, you've got this nice, oh, I just, I just, uh, broke it. Oh, no, no, I didn't. It didn't, I didn't break it. It goes through the thing.

• 36:37Scott Tolinski?

  That's great. I'm glad you didn't break it, honestly. I'm super glad.

• 36:41Wes Bos?

  But like, if you've got like a, a nice photo you wanna hang up or whatever, and you don't feel like going the whole route of a regular picture frame. Grab a set of these. They're like, I don't know, five, 10 bucks or something like that. And, uh, it looks really nice. They have them in all the different colors, like a black one, a white one. This, my, we got the teak version. It looks best with our house.

• 37:00Scott Tolinski?

  That's dope. Um, I'm gonna, uh, sick pick something kind of off board here. In Colorado West, it's so dry here. It's so dry. I have not been able to get a handle on like, you know, the chapstick. I'm putting chapstick on like every three seconds. My skin is super dry. And nothing I've found that has been very good for that until, uh, I started using Aquaphor Healing Ointment Advanced Therapy. And it's like a, a bomb, but it's, it's essentially, it's essentially petroleum jelly, but like with several other things like, I believe like lanolin or some other stuff in here.

• 37:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah, we slap that on our kids' butts. And we're, we're, we buy the huge ones of that.

• 37:39Scott Tolinski?

  I buy the huge one. Yeah, I buy the huge one. And, and this is like the best thing I've ever had.

• 37:44Wes Bos?

  It's amazing.

• 37:45Scott Tolinski?

  Chapstick ever in my entire life. And I, I hate the chapstick you gotta put your finger on whatever. But I'm, I'm doing it for this because it works so dang well. And I'd used Aquaphor before for like, you know, like tattoo healing and stuff like that. But man, best chapstick around. And this stuff rules. I think like, I've never had a more healthy skin since I've moved here with this stuff. So shout out to, shout out to Aquaphor, right?

• 38:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah, it's, it's good stuff. We're, we found a small version of it as well when we were in the States. At I think CVS or something like that. And it's, it's like a mini one we can kind of just keep in, in the diaper bag. And you don't have to bring the huge one around. So it's, it's expensive stuff, but man, it's awesome.

• 38:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, for this, this big ass tub, 14 ounce jar, it's 15 bucks. But I, I bought one jar of this in the past year and I'm not even halfway through it.

• 38:38Wes Bos?

  It's a lot more expensive in Canada. It's like 45 or something.

• 38:41Scott Tolinski?

  Geez, oh my god.

• 38:44Wes Bos?

  Yeah, 15 is not bad at all, though that'll last you forever. Yeah, cool.

• 38:48Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, okay, shout out to Aquaphor. Shameless plug, I'm gonna shamelessly plug the Syntax YouTube channel, obviously. I'm gonna do a video on SST config in, in dev here. So if you are interested in seeing some of this more in action and like an actual code, how to way, step by step, hit up the YouTube account. YouTube.com forward slash at Syntax FM. Smash that subscribe button. Wes and I and CJ are all going to switch to NeoVim the moment we hit 500,000 subscribers. So if you want to see, just click that subscribe button. Follow, like, all that good stuff.

• 39:21Wes Bos?

  I'm gonna become a pro at it, yeah.

• 39:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and just share, share if you like any of our videos. Make sure you like them, share them, all that stuff. It just helps us, helps us get out there. So thank you so much.

• 39:31Wes Bos?

  All right, thanks for tuning in. Catch you later. Peace.

• 39:34Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.