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

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 could not 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 are not reported on if they have failed to create by design.

Smoke testing for EC2 auto scaling groups

For example...