AWS CloudFormation Posts

AWS CDK and AWS CloudFormation are powerful infrastructure as code tools to automate the creation of your AWS resources. Both tools can help you achieve operational excellency on AWS by removing manual provisioning methods like AWS Management Console or AWS CLI and eliminating possible human errors caused by only using them.

However, you might be wondering which to choose if you are new to AWS CDK or CloudFormation or just beginning to apply infrastructure as code on AWS. Therefore, in this post, I will discuss the differences and similarities between AWS CloudFormation and AWS CDK to help you understand them.

Continue reading the AWS CDK vs. AWS CloudFormation blog post.

Stack policies are among the most helpful features of AWS CloudFormation for protecting your stacks from unintended updates. Let’s say that you have an Amazon RDS instance that you manage with AWS CloudFormation. After a while, you change one of its attributes and update your stack. Guess what! The update you considered innocent was not so after all. It replaces your database instance with all the data inside. It’s a nightmare, isn’t it? So, you wish there were a CloudFormation feature preventing this from happening.

Luckily, CloudFormation has stack policies to help you in situations like this. In this post, I will talk about stack policies and how to use them as a supplementary protection mechanism in your stack updates.

Continue reading the AWS CloudFormation Stack Policy Conditions: Don't Replace or Delete My DB Instances on Stack Updates blog post.

In this blog, I talk about the benefits of defining your infrastructure as code using AWS CloudFormation from time to time. You define the properties of your AWS resources in a template and create a stack from it. When you need an update, you edit your template accordingly and update your stack. Don’t need a resource anymore? Just remove it from your template and update your stack again. Or, delete your stack if you no longer wish to keep any of its resources. In an ideal scenario, you keep your infrastructure code, your CloudFormation templates, in the same repository as your project and use a CI/CD pipeline to deploy it.

You can manage most AWS resources with AWS CloudFormation like this. However, Amazon EC2 instances are somewhat different. Again, you have properties like the subnet, instance type, or security groups of an EC2 instance as in other resource types. But, you also make custom, OS-level changes after creation, such as installing software packages, downloading or configuring files, etc. Besides, you may need to update this configuration later. It is why configuring an EC2 instance with CloudFormation needs more attention, and we have a dedicated section about it in my AWS CloudFormation Step by Step: Intermediate to Advanced course.

In this post, I will summarize how to manage EC2 instances using AWS CloudFormation. Firstly, we will discuss the UserData property. Then, we will continue with AWS CloudFormation helper scripts: cfn-signal, cfn-init and cfn-hup. We will also see the CreationPolicy attribute along the way. So, let’s start!

Continue reading the Configuring Amazon EC2 Instances With AWS CloudFormation blog post.

AWS CodePipeline provides AWS CloudFormation Create or update stack and Create or replace change set action types to deploy your CloudFormation stacks from your pipeline. If you have joined my AWS CodePipeline Step by Step course, you would remember our example there. We automatically create a staging stack from a CloudFormation template before the manual approval action in our pipeline.

However, AWS CodePipeline’s CloudFormation action types only create stacks from deployable stack templates. Therefore, you cannot deploy your CloudFormation nested stacks with local path template definitions directly without packaging and uploading them to an S3 bucket first. In this post, I will talk about achieving this on an AWS CodePipeline pipeline using AWS CodeBuild.

Continue reading the Deploying CloudFormation Nested Stacks With AWS CodePipeline & AWS CodeBuild blog post.

As you start using AWS CloudFormation for bigger projects, your templates and stacks get larger. Therefore, managing them gets more difficult day by day. Then, at some point, you realize that you need a way to divide your templates into smaller ones to manage them more efficiently.

AWS CloudFormation provides two methods for this, cross-stack references and nested stacks. As you may guess, each technique has different use cases and strengths. Hence, in this post, let’s discuss some of the differences between cross-stack references and nested stacks.

Continue reading the Nested Stacks or Cross-stack References? Which to Organize Your AWS CloudFormation Stacks? blog post.