Control the cloud with code!
Take control of the cloud with AWS CloudFormation Templates!
Hey Cloud Gurus! AWS CloudFormation was launched to solve one of the most common problems when deploying multiple things in the Cloud: environment immutability. Before cloud it was a nightmare to create new environments in a dedicated infrastructure or a virtual one.
Free services are not something that you typically associate with AWS… but AWS CloudFormation is 100% free! You pay nothing for creating, deleting or modifying an AWS CloudFormation Stack.
The other thing AWS solves with CloudFormation is the service’s launch dependency and how you can automatically launch and connect services between each other. From something as simple as reserving an elastic IP and attaching to an EC2 instance to deploy a full VPC stack including NAT Gateways, Subnets, Internet Gateways, etc.
CloudFormation has two parts: templates and stacks. A template is a JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) text file. The file, which is declarative and not scripted, defines what AWS resources or non-AWS resources are required to run the application. For example, the template may declare that the application requires an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance.
When the template is submitted to the service, CloudFormation creates the necessary resources in the customer’s account and builds a running instance of the template, putting dependencies and data flows in the right order automatically. The running instance is called a stack.
Customers can make changes to the stack after it’s been deployed by using CloudFormation tools and an editing process that is similar to version control. When a stack is deleted, all related resources are deleted automatically as well.
An important advantage of CloudFormation is that it allows developers to automate service provisioning steps in a fairly simple way.
The learning curve for CloudFormation is pretty straight forward once you have the right base understanding. There is no need to know how to code JSON as AWS also provides a tool called AWS CloudFormation Designer, which helps you to develop a template from scratch.
Once you get started with the fascinating world of CloudFormation and begin automating your AWS, you’ll never want to launch an EC2 or RDS instance manually again!
Fernando Hönig
I’ve just released a training course on A Cloud Guru called “Introduction to AWS CloudFormation”. It’s a great 90 minute intro showing you how to get your hands dirty with CloudFormation and deploy infrastructure as code! Check out A Cloud Guru for in-depth AWS training courses and AWS certification training.
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