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

Going through the internals of the template

The template is the main building block of CloudFormation. We can consider the template as a declarative instruction for CloudFormation—for example, what to create and how many.

The template file, whether in JSON or YAML, consists of several  elements, which we will describe in the rest of this section.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion

The AWSTemplateFormatVersion section is responsible for instructing CloudFormation as to what version of the template we are going to supply it with.

Not to be confused with the API version of CloudFormation, AWSTemplateFormatVersion is about the structure of the template.

When AWS has added this block to resolve potential breaking changes to CloudFormation, it can only have one value: "2010-09-09". This version is there from the very beginning of CloudFormation, but there is always a chance that AWS will add newer versions for template formatting. Until then, this section...