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 the use cases of the template macro

Before we dive into the internals of macros, we need to know what we can solve with them. Let’s look at a few cases and examples.

Auto-filling resource property values

Imagine having a launch template where you need to define an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) ID. For Amazon Linux AMI, you could use AWS’s Parameter Store:

Parameters:  ImageId:
    Type: AWS::SSM::Parameter::Value<AWS::EC2::Image::Id>
    Default: ‹/aws/service/ami-amazon-linux-latest/amzn2-ami-hvm-x86_64-gp2'
Resources:
  LaunchTemplate:
    Type: «AWS::EC2::LaunchTemplate»
    Properties:
      LaunchTemplateData:
        ImageId: !Ref ImageId

However, what if we don’t use Amazon Linux, but Ubuntu? We’d have to manually specify the AMI...