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

Dynamic references with Parameter Store and Secrets Manager

At the beginning of this chapter, we looked at working with static parameters either in JSON or command-line argument form.

Although it is a known practice in infrastructure-as-code to keep parameters in a Version Control System (VCS), it introduces additional complexity.

If we store parameters in a VCS, we need to take care of encrypting sensitive data, such as passwords or other credentials. If we pass them via command-line arguments, we have to make sure we don’t make a mistake or a typo (which is a common occurrence in the life of IT engineers).

To solve these issues, we can store template parameters in the SSM Parameter Store or Secrets Manager (for passwords).

They both support versioning, so we can always revert the parameters to the previous version if there was a mistake and then redeploy our stack.

Another benefit of using the Parameter Store and Secrets Manager is that we can provide developers...