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

Best practices for the release management of CloudFormation stacks

Before we build our very first pipeline for CD, I want to focus on this important topic. In this section, we will go through the best practices for the release management of CloudFormation stacks.

By the end, we want to treat our infrastructure like a computer program, so let’s use the experience of software development!

Always use version control systems

Your infrastructure is now code. So, you need to have version control on it. Version Control Systems (VCS) have several benefits, including code collaboration, change history, centralized storage for source code, integration with build systems, and much more.

In order to keep your infrastructure clean and well maintained and your changes well observed, always keep your CloudFormation templates in VCS.

Ensure that your dependencies can be easily retrieved

In this and the previous chapter, we developed several scripts for our templates, including...