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

Writing your first template using AWS CDK and Python

We will begin by installing the prerequisites for CDK. Even though we are going to write our code in Python, we still need to install nodejs. Once this is done, we can install CDK:

$ npm install -g aws-cdk

After this, we need to check whether everything is correct by printing out the version of CDK:

$ cdk --version

Installing CDK doesn't mean we have all the construct libraries.

First, we need to initialize the environment:

$ mkdir app && cd app
$ cdk init app --profile personal --language=python
$ source .env/bin/activate
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

Then, we install the core components of CDK:

$ pip install --upgrade aws-cdk.core

The cdk init phrase will create all the files, so we can start developing our infrastructure right away.

Preparing constructs

We will build the same infrastructure that we built in Chapter 2, Advanced Template Development. Our infrastructure will consist...