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AWS CloudFormation
ByAWS CloudFormationAWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

#26in Build Automation
Discussions11
Followers1.33k
OverviewDiscussions11

What is AWS CloudFormation?

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

AWS CloudFormation is a tool in the Build Automation category of a tech stack.

Key Features

AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt)No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack)Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.

AWS CloudFormation Pros & Cons

Pros of AWS CloudFormation

  • ✓Automates infrastructure deployments
  • ✓Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • ✓No more clicking around
  • ✓Any Operative System you want
  • ✓Atomic
  • ✓Infrastructure as code
  • ✓Automates Infrastructure Deployment
  • ✓CDK makes it truly infrastructure-as-code
  • ✓K8s

Cons of AWS CloudFormation

  • ✗Brittle
  • ✗No RBAC and policies in templates

AWS CloudFormation Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation?

Packer

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

Pulumi

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

AWS Cloud Development Kit

AWS Cloud Development Kit

It is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. It uses the familiarity and expressive power of programming languages for modeling your applications. It provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert.

Yocto

Yocto

It is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. It provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices, or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed.

GeoEngineer

GeoEngineer

GeoEngineer uses Terraform to plan and execute changes, so the DSL to describe resources is similar to Terraform's. GeoEngineer's DSL also provides programming and object oriented features like inheritance, abstraction, branching and looping.

Azure Resource Manager

Azure Resource Manager

It is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.

AWS CloudFormation Integrations

Kocho, λ Gordon, Bellerophon, troposphere, dawson and 7 more are some of the popular tools that integrate with AWS CloudFormation. Here's a list of all 12 tools that integrate with AWS CloudFormation.

Kocho
Kocho
λ Gordon
λ Gordon
Bellerophon
Bellerophon
troposphere
troposphere
dawson
dawson
GoFormation
GoFormation
Datomic Cloud
Datomic Cloud
AWS CodeBuild
AWS CodeBuild
Gravity
Gravity
Circonus
Circonus
Kumologica
Kumologica
Bridgecrew
Bridgecrew

AWS CloudFormation Discussions

Discover why developers choose AWS CloudFormation. Read real-world technical decisions and stack choices from the StackShare community.

Caleb
Caleb

Lead Software Engineer at Volta Industries

Dec 2, 2018

Needs adviceonAWS CodePipelineAWS CodePipelineAWS CodeBuildAWS CodeBuildAWS LambdaAWS Lambda

At Volta we use AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeBuild to automatically ship new AWS Lambda services without any effort. And we do it all with AWS CloudFormation, since configuration is easier to maintain than code.

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Glenn 'devalias' Grant
Glenn 'devalias' Grant

Hack. Dev. Transcend.

Sep 19, 2018

Needs adviceonReactReactReduxReduxredux-sagaredux-saga

Working on a project recently, wanted an easy modern frontend to work with, decoupled from our backend. To get things going quickly, decided to go with React, Redux, redux-saga, Bootstrap.

On the backend side, Golang is a personal favourite, and wanted to minimize server overheads so went with a #serverless architecture leveraging AWS Lambda, AWS CloudFormation, Amazon DynamoDB, etc.

For IDE/tooling I tend to stick to the #JetBrains tools: WebStorm / Goland.

Obviously using Git, with GitLab private repo's for managing code/issues/etc.

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Thierry Schellenbach
Thierry Schellenbach

CEO at Stream

Sep 13, 2018

Needs adviceonAWS CloudFormationAWS CloudFormation

We heavily use AWS CloudFormation. Every single piece of our stack is defined in a CloudFormation template. Because our infrastructure is defined in code it has become trivial to launch new regions. If needed we are able to spawn a new dedicated shard in a few minutes. In addition, AWS Parameter Store is used to hold application settings. Our largest deployment is in US-East, but we also have regions in Tokyo, Singapore and Dublin.

#InfrastructureBuildTools #BuildTestDeploy

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Chris Shellenbarger
Chris Shellenbarger

Founder at CloudRepo

Nov 2, 2017

Needs adviceonAWS CloudFormationAWS CloudFormation

Manually clicking around the AWS UI or scripting AWS CLI calls can be both a slow and brittle process.

We needed to be able to reconstruct CloudRepo's infrastructure in case of disaster or moving to another AWS Region.

Setting up our infrastructure with CloudFormation allows us to update it easily as well as duplicate or recreate things when the need arises. AWS CloudFormation

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opstax
opstax

Feb 2, 2015

Needs adviceonAWS CloudFormationAWS CloudFormation

Opstax uses CloudFormation for anything infrastructure related! CloudFormation allows us to use infrastructure-as-code as a constant blueprint/map of our environment. It means we can accurately and efficiently deploy replicated or new infrastructure with no time wasted clicking around and no human error. AWS CloudFormation

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