Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation

By : Karen Tovmasyan
Book Image

Mastering AWS CloudFormation

By: Karen Tovmasyan

Overview of this book

DevOps and the cloud revolution have forced software engineers and operations teams to rethink how to manage infrastructures. With this AWS book, you'll understand how you can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to simplify IT operations and manage the modern cloud infrastructure effectively with AWS CloudFormation. This comprehensive guide will help you explore AWS CloudFormation from template structures through to developing complex and reusable infrastructure stacks. You'll then delve into validating templates, deploying stacks, and handling deployment failures. The book will also show you how to leverage AWS CodeBuild and CodePipeline to automate resource delivery and apply continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices to the stack. As you advance, you'll learn how to generate templates on the fly using macros and create resources outside AWS with custom resources. Finally, you'll improve the way you manage the modern cloud in AWS by extending CloudFormation using AWS serverless application model (SAM) and AWS cloud development kit (CDK). By the end of this book, you'll have mastered all the major AWS CloudFormation concepts and be able to simplify infrastructure management.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: CloudFormation Internals
4
Section 2: Provisioning and Deployment at Scale
9
Section 3: Extending CloudFormation

Understanding the difference between Terraform and CloudFormation

First of all, we are not evaluating CloudFormation and Terraform to find the best infrastructure-as-code instrument on the market. Our goal is to find a tool that fits the purpose and our use case (whatever it is going to be).

We are going to look at the following features:

  • Provider support
  • Declaration syntax
  • Development and deployment methodologies

Let's start with provider support.

Provider support

CloudFormation as an invention of Amazon Web Services originally supported itself as the only service provider.

Terraform was developed as a cloud-agnostic tool, meaning that it could communicate with various cloud and service providers, thus making it one tool to rule them all.

This concept was made available with the use of providers—specific abstractions that handle communication between a service provider and Terraform. Providers are written in the same language as Terraform...