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 difference between Terraform and CloudFormation

First of all, we are not evaluating CloudFormation and Terraform to find the best IaC instrument on the market. Our goal is to find a tool that fits the purpose and our use case (whatever it is going to be).

We are going to look at the following features:

  • Provider support
  • Declaration syntax
  • Development and deployment methodologies

Let’s start with provider support.

Provider support

CloudFormation, as an invention of AWS, originally supported itself as the only service provider.

Terraform was developed as a cloud-agnostic tool, meaning that it could communicate with various cloud and service providers, thus making it one tool to rule them all.

This concept was made available with the use of providers – specific abstractions that handle communication between a service provider and Terraform. Providers are written in the same language as Terraform (for example, Golang...