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

Advanced Template Development

Bearing in mind the basics of CloudFormation, let’s now move on to advanced development techniques.

In this chapter, we will learn more about the core parts of CloudFormation templates, and we will do so by building a three-tier application consisting of a web tier (our customer-facing frontend), a middleware tier (processing commands coming from the frontend), and a storage tier (the database where we will store records).

Figure 2.1 – Application architecture

Figure 2.1 – Application architecture

Don’t worry! We’re not going to write any software yet (only templates for CloudFormation). For now, we will focus on provisioning our infrastructure.

We will cover the following topics in this chapter:

  • Going through the internals of the template
  • Creating reusable templates
  • Using conditional elements
  • Deletion policies
  • Referring to existing stacks
  • AWS pseudo parameters
  • Dynamic references with AWS Systems...