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

Running smoke tests on your stack

How do we know whether our application is healthy once it is deployed?

In addition to monitoring, logging, and alerting, there is a method called smoke testing.

Smoke testing is a method of testing that is applied during or after an application’s release. It helps us to understand whether the current release is functional or whether it contains several bugs or failures that require immediate rollback.

CloudFormation has an out-of-the-box rollback feature. As we know, it will roll back our stack to the previous healthy state if at least one of the changes cannot be applied or a resource cannot be created. From the perspective of AWS, it is usually an AWS service that reports that the resource creation has failed and that the error we are seeing is actually an error message from AWS’ API. However, some resources do not report back to CloudFormation if they have failed to be created. Let me explain in the following example.

Smoke...