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

Deletion policies

When we create our stack, we need to make sure that mission-critical resources are protected from accidental deletion.

In some cases, this is enabled by EnableTerminationProtection for services such as EC2 and RDS. S3 buckets, when filled with objects, will fail to delete because they have to be emptied first.

Deletion policies allow you to mitigate this risk within CloudFormation. In addition, deletion policies give you a few more features in addition to basic termination protection.

For example, say that you have created a testing stack that you don't need once the testing phase is finished, but you need the dump of the database (which is actually a snapshot of the RDS instance). Sometimes, you don't want to recreate the same data structure, or the database already has important data that you want to move to the production environment.

Let's see whether deletion policies can help us:

Resources:
  VeryImportantDb:
  ...