Runway

Abstract

1. Introduction

Runway is a lightweight integration app designed to ease management of infrastructure tools.

Its main goals are to encourage GitOps best-practices, avoid convoluted Makefiles/scripts (enabling identical deployments from a workstation or CI job), and enable developers/admins to use the best tool for any given job.

2. Objective

Simplify infrastructure/app deployment.

This project demonstrates how Python, AWS, AWS Lambda can be applied to a real-world Blockchain & Cloud Computing problem.

3. Key Features / Modules

• Centralized environment-specific configuration
• Automatic environment identification from git branches
• Support of IAM roles to assume for each deployment
• Terraform backend/workspace config management w/per-environment tfvars
• Automatic terraform version management per-environment

4. Technology Stack

• Serverless Framework
• CFNgin (CloudFormation)
• Static websites (build & deploy to S3+CloudFront)
• Terraform

5. System Requirements

General requirements for this technology stack — check the README for exact versions.

• Python 3.8 or later
• pip / virtualenv for dependencies
• VS Code, PyCharm or Jupyter Notebook
• Git (to clone the repository)

6. Installation & Setup

git clone https://github.com/rackspace/runway.git
cd runway

1. Serverless Framework
2. CFNgin (CloudFormation)
3. Static websites (build & deploy to S3+CloudFront)
4. Terraform

$ pip install runway
$ runway new
# OR
$ poetry add --dev runway
$ poetry run runway new

Full setup instructions are in the project README.

7. Future Enhancements

Suggested extensions you can add to make this your own project.

• Add a CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions
• Deploy to a public test network or cloud free tier
• Add monitoring and cost alerts

8. Viva / Review Questions

Common questions examiners ask for projects in this domain.

1. Why does this problem need a blockchain or cloud-native design?
2. Explain the smart contract / infrastructure components and how they interact.
3. How are gas costs or cloud costs kept under control?
4. How is the system secured (keys, IAM, access control)?
5. How would the solution scale to many more users?

9. Source Code & License

This project is developed by rackspace and published on GitHub under the Apache License 2.0. Please follow the license terms and credit the original author when you use or modify this code.