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

The future of infrastructure as code

Before we can foresee the future, we need to understand the past.

The term IaC is not new. Its roots are deep in the 90s when sysadmins used Perl and Shell scripts to automate their regular routines. Sysadmins were the same as developers but with a different focus (mostly automation and the stability of their infrastructure).

This focus started to shift as soon as Amazon Web Services (AWS) was launched in 2006, and it became a matter of a few minutes to have a fleet of virtual machines at your disposal. The increased speed of provisioning introduced the issue of scaling performance.

In addition, it was hard to develop your own infrastructure management tools using high-level programming languages. In the end, configuration-management tools started to appear: Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and others.

Later on, idempotence and declarable infrastructure became necessary requirements. Configuration-management tools could provide a state of the...