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

Best practices for the release management of CloudFormation stacks

Before we build our very first pipeline for Continuous Delivery, I want to focus on this important topic. In this section, we will go through the best practices for the release management of CloudFormation stacks.

By the end, we want to treat our infrastructure like a computer program, so let's use the experience of software development!

Always use version control systems

Your infrastructure is now code. So, you need to have version control on it. Version control systems (VCS) have several benefits, including code collaboration, change history, centralized storage for source code, integration with build systems, and much more.

In order to keep your infrastructure clean and well-maintained and your changes well-observed, always keep your CloudFormation templates in VCS.

Ensuring that your dependencies can be easily retrieved

In this and the previous chapter, we developed several scripts for our...