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

Dynamically Rendering the Template Using Template Macros

Sometimes when we work with templates, we want to dynamically assign values to resources or alter the template quickly during stack operations.

One of the most well-known template macros is SAM or the Serverless Application Model, which is a simplified CloudFormation template for serverless applications (we will cover SAM in the next few chapters). Another well-known macro is AWS::Include, which allows us to append the CloudFormation template with boilerplate snippets.

In this chapter, we will learn about template macros and their use cases, and we will develop our own macros.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding use cases of template macros
  • Introducing the template macro
  • Writing your own macros