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

Advanced Template Development

Bearing in mind the basics of CloudFormation, let's now move on to advanced development techniques.

In this chapter, we will learn more about the core parts of the CloudFormation templates, and we will do so by building a three-tier application consisting of a web tier (our customer-facing frontend), a middleware tier (processing commands coming from the frontend), and a storage tier (the database where we will store the records).

Don't worry! We're not going to write any software yet (only templates for CloudFormation). For now, we will focus on provisioning our infrastructure.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Going through the internals of the template
  • Creating reusable templates
  • Using conditional elements
  • Deletion policies
  • Referring to existing stacks
  • AWS pseudo parameters
  • Dynamic references with Parameter Store and Secrets Manager