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

Summary

In this chapter, we learned about one of the biggest features of CloudFormation for managing custom resource types. We managed not only to activate and use public resource types, but also to develop our own.

Resource types were built for third-party services such as those from other cloud service providers, but they also allow us to build powerful automations for our internal tools.

And that is what we did! We generated our own resource schema, built some code that communicates with our database, and adopted it to work with the CloudFormation native handler. Before submitting the resource type, we ensured it matches the contract by running an acceptance test.

Deployments using publicly accessible databases are not, however, a secure option. Think, how could you harden it and make it more secure? Would you try using IAM authentication or some secure endpoint such as RDS Proxy?

I leave these answers to you. Try out answering the following questions to test your knowledge...