CloudFormation

Overview

• CloudFormation is a declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure, for any resources (most of them are supported).

• For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:

• I want a security group

• I want two EC2 instances using this security group

• I want an S3 bucket

• I want a load balancer (ELB) in front of these machines

• Then CloudFormation creates those for you, in the right order, with the exact configuration that you specify

Benefits of AWS CloudFormation

• Infrastructure as code

• No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control • Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code

• Cost

• Each resource within the stack is tagged with an identifier so you can easily see how

  much a stack costs you

• You can estimate the costs of your resources using the CloudFormation template

• Savings strategy: In Dev, you could automate the deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreate at 8 AM, safely

• Productivity

• Ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly

• Automated generation of Diagram for your templates!

• Declarative programming (no need to figure out ordering and orchestration)

• Don’t re-invent the wheel

• Leverage existing templates on the web!

• Leverage the documentation

• Supports (almost) all AWS resources:

• Everything we’ll see in this course is supported

• You can use “custom resources” for resources that are not supported

CloudFormation Stack Designer

• Example: WordPress CloudFormation Stack

• We can see all the resources

• We can see the relations between the components