CloudFormation

Objective

• Learn cloud formation master all its concepts
• Go through hands on examples to practice what we learned
• Learn how to use YAML to write the CF templates
• Learn how to write your infrastructure as code
• Launch several templates
• Advanced concept overview

What is CloudFormation?

CloudFormation is a declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure, for any resources (most of them are supported). It is proprietry based IaC method to manage our AWS Infrastructure.

For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:

• I want a security group
• I want two EC2 machines using this security group
• I want two Elastic IPs for these EC2 machines
• 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

Infrastructure as code

• No resources are manually created, which is excellent for control
• The code can be version controlled for example using git
• Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through code

Cost

• Each resources within the stack is stagged 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 automation deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreated 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)

Separation of concern

Create many stacks for many apps, and many layers. Ex:

• VPC stacks
• Network stacks
• App stacks

Don't re-invent the wheel

• Leverage existing templates on the web!
• Leverage the documentation

Cost Estimation

• You can estimate the cost of a stack very easily
• For this, you just upload the stack on the AWS Console, enter a few parameters, then click on "Cost"

Quick Demo!

CloudFormation versus Ansible and Terraform

• CloudFormation is AWS native, and will always contain the latest features and options for AWS Services
• CloudFormation is state based, and AWS figures out how to reach that state
• Ansible and Terraform are instruction based, and it can be difficult to fully orchestrate your stacks
• Ansible and Terraform have to be updated every time a new Services or API option comes from AWS, which can take a long time