Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation - Second Edition

By : Karen Tovmasyan
Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation - Second Edition

By: Karen Tovmasyan

Overview of this book

The advent of DevOps and the cloud revolution has compelled software engineers and operations teams to rethink how to manage complex infrastructures and build resilient solutions. With this AWS book, you’ll find out how you can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to simplify infrastructure operations and manage the modern cloud with AWS CloudFormation. This guide covers AWS CloudFormation comprehensively, from template structures to developing complex and reusable infrastructure stacks. It takes you through template validation, stack deployment, and handling deployment failures. It also demonstrates the use of AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline for automating resource delivery and implementing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices. As you advance, you’ll learn how to modularize and unify your template on the fly using macros or by fixating the version using modules. You’ll create resources outside of AWS with custom resources and catalog them with the CloudFormation registry. Finally, you’ll improve the way you manage the modern cloud environment on AWS by extending CloudFormation through the AWS serverless application model (SAM) and the AWS cloud development kit (CDK). By the end of this book, you’ll have mastered key AWS CloudFormation concepts and will be able to extend its capabilities for developing and deploying your own infrastructure.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Part 1: CloudFormation Internals
4
Part 2: Provisioning and Deployment at Scale
9
Part 3: Extending CloudFormation

Understanding CRs

When we declare a resource in a CloudFormation template, we provide a Type attribute. This attribute declares a service and a resource that is going to be created—this means that CloudFormation understands where to go, what to do, and which API calls to make. AWS is a main namespace (e.g., resource provider), and what comes after AWS is another namespace, declaring the service. If it’s EC2, then CloudFormation will send calls to EC2’s API. If it’s RDS, then it sends calls to RDS’s API. The last block is the actual resource we want to create.

CRs are resources that don’t fall under the native support of CloudFormation. These can be external providers, internal or self-hosted systems, or even services that don’t support CloudFormation yet. The creation of CRs is usually a contract with three counteragents—the template developer, CR provider, and CloudFormation. While the template developer is responsible for...