DevOps Posts

AWS CloudFormation provides handful pseudo parameters which you can use to increase the reusability of your templates along with your template conditions and parameters. One of them is AWS::NoValue parameter which acts like the null value in programming languages.

In this post, I will talk about some examples of its use cases.

I am happy to announce that my new course, AWS CloudFormation Step by Step: Beginner to Intermediate, is now live on Udemy.

In this post, I want to introduce you with this new course. I will talk about the topics, what you will learn by taking it as well as the structure of the course. In addition, I will also share a free coupon that will be valid for a limited time with the followers of this blog. Read more at My New Course AWS CloudFormation Step by Step: Beginner to Intermediate is Live! post.

In an AWS CloudFormation template, you define independent resources or resources that are implicitly dependent, in other words, reference other resources. For instance, you can define an EC2 instance and a security group. Then, you might choose to attach the security group to the instance or not. In these two cases, AWS CloudFormation organizes the order of the creation of resources differently.

In addition, you might have another resource such as an Amazon SNS topic in the same template which you might want to provision after your EC2 instance created. Maybe you have an explicit dependency between them.

In this blog post, I will talk about how AWS CloudFormation handles the order of creation for independent or implicitly dependent resources. I will also explain how you can add your own dependencies in a template, as well. Read more at The Order of Resource Creations on AWS CloudFormation post.

The most popular usage of Amazon CloudFront is to distribute static content such as images, videos or other objects existing in an Amazon S3 bucket. However, you can also use Amazon CloudFront to distribute your dynamic content such as a Ruby on Rails or PHP web application and benefit from the advantages of utilizing the globally distributed network infrastructure of AWS. In this blog post, I will talk about the advantages and the necessary configuration options for creating an Amazon CloudFront distribution for a dynamic web application. Read more at Serving Dynamic Websites with Amazon CloudFront post.

Today, encrypting data at rest is crucial for enhancing security of our applications. Besides, it might be a requirement for your compliance regulations. Whatever the reason is, it is a best practice to encrypt your Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes. In this post, I will show you how to encrypt an Amazon EBS volume using its integration with Amazon Key Management Service (KMS). Read more at Encrypting Amazon EBS Volumes post.