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

AWS pseudo parameters

What makes these parameters special? Well, the fact that they are obtained from AWS itself.

The current list of these parameters is as follows:

  • AWS::AccountId
  • AWS::NotificationARNs
  • AWS::NoValue
  • AWS::Region
  • AWS::StackId
  • AWS::StackName
  • AWS::URLSuffix
  • AWS::Partition

We're not going to cover all of them, only the most widely used ones.

AWS::AccountId

One of the use cases where we need to use AccountId is when we are using an IAM principal.

If you are familiar with IAM, then you know that we can set the AWS account ID as a principal element. If you need to refresh your memory regarding IAM, you can read a great blog series at https://medium.com/@thomas.storm/aws-iam-deep-dive-chapter-1-essentials-a9cfb1931a01.

At the same time, it is dangerous to expose your AWS account ID; we should always stick to using AWS pseudo parameters when we specify this kind of sensitive information.

An example usage of AWS...