AWS reference solution for a serverless SaaS system - Error: Template file not found - template.yml

Question

I'm trying to deploy an AWS reference solution using AWS Cloud9, that demonstrates a sample SaaS system. The repo for the solution is here:

https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/blob/main/DOCUMENTATION.md

There's a deployment file that can be run in order to bootstrap the example system in AWS - it's /aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/deployment.sh within the repo.

Part of the deployment script builds bootstrap resources using the file /aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/server/bootstrap-template.yaml , which is a CloudFormation template. The script then deploys bootstrap resources based on the configuration file /aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/server/samconfig-bootstrap.toml

The relevant parts of ./deployment.sh that perform the build and bootstrap are as follows. The build and deployment utilise the AWS 'Serverless Application Model' (sam):

sam build -t bootstrap-template.yaml --use-container --region=$REGION
sam deploy --config-file samconfig-bootstrap.toml --region=$REGION --parameter-overrides AdminEmailParameter=$1 

When I run the ./deployment.sh on a Cloud 9 instance on EC2 (in Singapore region), I get the following error during the common resource bootstrapping stage:

[11034] Failed to execute script main

sam deploy --config-file samconfig-bootstrap.toml --region=ap-southeast-1 --parameter-overrides AdminEmailParameter=chris.halcrow@elenium.com
Error: Template file not found at /home/ec2-user/environment/aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/server/template.yml

I'm not seeing anything when I search the code for template.yml , so I'm not sure what's attempting to reference this. The file isn't present in the solution.

The guide here describes how to quickly set up an AWS Cloud9 environment running on an EC2 instance, into which the solution can be cloned from its Github repo in order to run the ./deployment.sh script - https://catalog.us-east-1.prod.workshops.aws/workshops/b0c6ad36-0a4b-45d8-856b-8a64f0ac76bb/en-US/pre-requisites/12-own-aws-account

Answer 1

After looking at the build-spec file (buildspec.yaml files are used to provide meta-data for CI/CD in AWS CodeBuild), it seems that the AWS team is testing the deployment using CI/CD Pipelines and forgot to update the shell script.

You on the other hand don't need to worry about the the build-spec file.

Solution
Go and just change template.yml to tenant-template.yaml

Answer 2

I found out that template.yml is an artifact that's normally produced during the build process - see SAM deploy command reference

sam deploy

By default when you use this command, the AWS SAM CLI assumes that your current working directory is your project's root directory. The AWS SAM CLI first tries to locate a template file built using the sam build command, located in the.aws-sam subfolder, and named template.yaml.

It seems that the template.yml wasn't being created due to insufficient memory size of the EC2 instance that Cloud9 was running in.

The solution for this was provided by @ujwalbukka in the following git issue, within the repo for the reference solution:

https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-saas-factory-ref-solution-serverless-saas/issues/19

To get the SaaS reference solution to run in Cloud9, I cloned an additional repo inside Cloud9 (the repo for the AWS workshop for the SaaS reference solution). I cloned this using git clone https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-serverless-saas-workshop.git

After cloning that repo, I ran through the steps here to run scripts that exist in the workshop repo, that increase the Cloud9 EC2 instance size and install the prerequisites for running the reference solution.