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

Including a template in your application

You will recall from the previous chapters that we had several templates for different tiers. We had core (network and security), web (frontend), middleware (backend), and database tiers.

So far, we haven't stored our templates in the version control system, but since we need to apply Continuous Delivery, we need to figure out the proper way to store them. Normally, it all depends on how you want to organize your workflow. If you have a separate operations or cloud team that is responsible for infrastructure and operations, it is wise to keep all the templates in a single repository. Developers will then supply you with any desired changes to the infrastructure or with the new version of the application.

Our flow is as follows:

  1. The developer publishes a new version of an app.
  2. The developer provides the operations team with the new version and/or changes.
  3. The operations team makes changes to parameters and/or templates...