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

Configuration Management of the EC2 Instances Using cfn-init

There are multiple ways to manage the configuration of your EC2 instances and applications on AWS. There is  user-data, a basic shell script that runs during the launch of an EC2 instance. You can use configuration management systems, such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack, to manage your resources. AWS provides a service called OpsWorks—a managed Chef or Puppet server.

We are going to learn about cfn-init (CloudFormation's own configuration management tool) and how can we use it to deploy applications on EC2 resources. We are going to cover cfn-init along with AWS::CloudFormation:Init, CloudFormation's metadata key, which actually declares configuration items for EC2 resources.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Introducing cfn-init
  • Deploying your application on EC2 during stack creation
  • Using cfn-signal to inform CloudFormation of resource readiness...