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

Scale Your Templates Using Macros, Nested Stacks, and Modules

Sometimes, when we work with templates, we want to dynamically assign values to resources or alter the template quickly during stack operations. Sometimes, we want to have a modular structure for our stacks and enhance reusability.

One of the most well-known template macros is the Serverless Application Model (SAM), which is a simplified CloudFormation template for serverless applications (we will cover SAM in the next few chapters). Another well-known macro is AWS::Include, which allows us to append the CloudFormation template with boilerplate snippets. When it comes to reusability and modularity, we can use nested stacks or register CloudFormation module extensions.

In this chapter, we will learn about template macros and their use cases, and we will develop our own macros. Later, we will take a quick look at nested stacks, examining why they are used way less than before and why modules have succeeded them. Finally...