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

Using CloudFormation language extensions

CloudFormation templates are in YAML or JSON format, but the template itself is a DSL – domain-specific language. While we can use YAML features such as anchors and aliases, CloudFormation supercharges generic indented text with variable references with Fn::Ref, class attribute getters with Fn::GetAtt, and CIDR range generation with Fn::Cidr and else.

One of the unpleasant limitations is when we have to create multiple similar resources or when we need to write JSON strings in the resource properties.

While repeatability is solved with other tools such as Cloud Development Kit and Serverless Application Model, AWS keeps improving CloudFormation, and with it has recently released Language Extensions (https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2022/09/aws-cloudformation-new-language-extensions-transform/).

One example usage we have already seen is the deletion policy, where we decide to retain or delete the database depending on...