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

Configuration Management of EC2 Instances Using cfn-init

There are multiple ways to manage the configuration of your EC2 instances and applications on AWS. There is UserData, a basic shell script that runs during the launch of an EC2 instance. You can use configuration management systems, such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack, to manage your resources. AWS provides a service called OpsWorks—a managed Chef or Puppet server.

We are going to learn about cfn-init (CloudFormation’s own configuration management tool) and how can we use it to deploy applications on EC2 resources. We are going to cover cfn-init along with AWS::CloudFormation:Init, CloudFormation’s metadata key, which actually declares configuration items for EC2 resources.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing cfn-init
  • Deploying your application on EC2 during stack creation
  • Using cfn-signal to inform CloudFormation of resource readiness