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

Writing your own macro

In this section, we will develop macros to solve the cases introduced in the first section of this chapter, the Understanding the use cases of template macros section. This will help us to get some hands-on experience and practice partial and full template processing.

Let’s start with the AMI ID filler!

AMI ID filler

Let’s start with a simple task and create a macro that will automatically find the AMI ID for EC2. By the end of this section, we will have a macro that automatically puts a correct AMI in the resource properties.

As you might remember, our main template will look like the following:

Resources:  LaunchTemplate:
    Type: «AWS::EC2::LaunchTemplate»
    Properties:
      LaunchTemplateData:
        # This is a replacement for the field ImageId:
        ...