Mastering AWS CloudFormation

▶Book Description
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.

▶What You Will Learn
- Understand modern approaches to IaC
- Develop universal and reusable CloudFormation templates
- Discover ways to apply continuous delivery with CloudFormation
- Implement IaC best practices for the AWS Cloud
- Provision massive applications across multiple regions and accounts
- Automate template generation and software provisioning for AWS
- Extend CloudFormation with custom resources and template macros

▶Key Features
- Leverage AWS CloudFormation templates to manage your entire infrastructure
- Get up and running with writing your infrastructure as code and automating your environment
- Simplify infrastructure management and increase productivity with AWS CloudFormation

▶Who This Book Is For
If you are a developer who wants to learn how to write templates, a DevOps engineer interested in deployment and orchestration, or a solutions architect looking to understand the benefits of managing infrastructure with ease, this book is for you. Prior understanding of the AWS Cloud is necessary.

▶What this book covers
- Chapter 1, CloudFormation Refresher, reminds you what CloudFormation is and how it works.

Chapter 2, Advanced Template Development, covers every single piece of a template – a core component of CloudFormation.

Chapter 3, Validation, Linting, and Deployment of the Stack, teaches you about best practices for stack operations, from validation to running the stack in production.

Chapter 4, Continuous Integration and Deployment, covers another concept of Continuous Delivery and how it is applied with CloudFormation.

Chapter 5, Deploying to Multiple Regions and Accounts Using StackSets, explains how to manage stacks in a multi-region and multi-account environment.

Chapter 6, Configuration Management of the EC2 Instances Using cfn-init, explains how to install software and apply configuration management on EC2 instances using CloudFormation.

Chapter 7, Creating Resources outside AWS Using Custom Resources, explains how to create resources outside of CloudFormation.

Chapter 8, Dynamically Rendering the Template Using Template Macros, covers macros – an advanced concept of CloudFormation – and their use cases.

Chapter 9, Generating CloudFormation Templates Using AWS CDK, introduces Cloud Development Kit – a framework supporting multiple languages that is used to generate CloudFormation templates and operate stacks.

Chapter 10, Deploying Serverless Applications Using AWS SAM, teaches you how to provision resources for serverless applications using the Serverless Application Model – a simplified implementation of CloudFormation.

Chapter 11, What's Next?, gives a sneak peek of what we can expect from the future of Infrastructure-as-Code.