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

Going through the internals of the template

The template is the main building block of CloudFormation. We can consider the template as a declarative instruction for CloudFormation—for example, what to create and how many.

The template file, whether in JSON or YAML format, consists of several elements, which we will describe in the rest of this section.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion

The AWSTemplateFormatVersion section is responsible for instructing CloudFormation as to what version of the template we are going to supply it with.

Not to be confused with the API version of CloudFormation, AWSTemplateFormatVersion is about the structure of the template.

When AWS has added this block to resolve potential breaking changes to CloudFormation, it can only have one value: "2010-09-09". This version is there from the very beginning of CloudFormation, but there is always a chance that AWS will add newer versions for template formatting. Until then, this section is optional...