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 StackSets

Before we begin, we need to learn a bit about best practices for StackSets. This is crucial, because we don’t want to make a monstrous zoo instead of a properly organized infrastructure, and we want to have efficiency and transparency for stack operations. The most important of these are listed as follows:

  • Develop universal templates: By default, a StackSet deploys the same template and parameter set in all the regions and accounts. To allow this process to be as automated as possible, we must focus on the reusability of our template. Do not hardcode regions and Availability Zones; instead, use AWS Systems Manager (SSM) parameter stores in every account and region to ease the deployment of the StackSet. Don’t set names for global resources such as IAM roles, users, groups, policies, S3 buckets, and so on to avoid naming conflicts.

    Think big, start small. If you are asked to create a StackSet for an application that will serve tens of...