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

Best practices for StackSets

Before we begin, we need to learn a bit about best practices for StackSets. This is crucial, because we don't want to make a monstrous zoo instead of a properly organized infrastructure, and we want to have efficiency and transparency for stack operations. The most important of these are listed as follows:

  • Develop universal templates: By default, StackSet deploys the same template and parameter set in all the regions and accounts. To allow this process to be as automated as possible, we must focus on the reusability of our template. Do not hardcode regions and availability zones; instead, use AWS SSM parameter stores in every account and region to ease the deployment of StackSet. Don't set names for global resources such as IAM roles, users, groups, policies, S3 bucket, and so on to avoid naming conflicts.

    Think big, start small. If you are asked to create a StackSet for an application that will serve tens of accounts and regions, it is...