Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation

By : Karen Tovmasyan
Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation

By: Karen Tovmasyan

Overview of this book

DevOps and the cloud revolution have forced software engineers and operations teams to rethink how to manage infrastructures. With this AWS book, you'll understand how you can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to simplify IT operations and manage the modern cloud infrastructure effectively with AWS CloudFormation. This comprehensive guide will help you explore AWS CloudFormation from template structures through to developing complex and reusable infrastructure stacks. You'll then delve into validating templates, deploying stacks, and handling deployment failures. The book will also show you how to leverage AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to automate resource delivery and apply continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to the stack. As you advance, you'll learn how to generate templates on the fly using macros and create resources outside AWS with custom resources. Finally, you'll improve the way you manage the modern cloud in AWS by extending CloudFormation using AWS serverless application model (SAM) and AWS cloud development kit (CDK). By the end of this book, you'll have mastered all the major AWS CloudFormation concepts and be able to simplify infrastructure management.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: CloudFormation Internals
4
Section 2: Provisioning and Deployment at Scale
9
Section 3: Extending CloudFormation

Introducing AWS SAM

Before we learn about SAM, let's quickly look at what serverless is. Serverless is a way of developing, running, and operating applications without needing to manage its underlying infrastructure. You might wonder what the key difference is since you don't manage any infrastructure in AWS, and you would be right.

You don't have to manage any physical infrastructure in AWS, but if you run an EC2 instance, you need to take care of its underlying OSes, security, patches, and updates.

Then, you will need to consider AWS's managed Relational Database Service (RDS), where you don't have to worry about the underlying OS, but you still have to tweak its parameters, carry out performance tuning by reorganizing queries and tables, and create database indexes.

Serverless doesn't guarantee that no operational work will be required, but there are several differences between instance-based services (such as EC2, RDS, EMR, and MSK) and serverless...