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

Creating Your Own Resource Registry for CloudFormation

In the previous chapter, we managed non-AWS resources using CloudFormation’s custom resource. For a very long time, this was the only way to manage external resources and services, and CloudFormation was in a difficult place compared to its main competitor, Terraform.

The notion of provisioners allows Terraform to implement infrastructure on any cloud or service provider that has an API. The extensibility of Terraform was one of the strongest arguments in favor of Terraform versus CloudFormation.

To stay competitive, AWS developed the CloudFormation registry, a centralized place where CloudFormation users can store their own resource types, modules, and hooks.

In this chapter, we will set up CloudFormation to use third-party public extensions through our AWS account. Later, we will develop our own private registry that implements a capability to create custom databases in the RDS instance using CloudFormation, just...