AWS Cloudformation 101
In this post, I will provide an introduction to AWS Cloudformation, along with its core features and functions.
Overview
To understand AWS Cloudformation, we must understand the concept of IaC — Infrastructure as a code.
Redhat defines IaC as —
Infrastructure as Code is the managing and provisioning of infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes
IaC Benefits
“Infrastructure as a Code” provides multiple benefits!
- You can automate the deployments based on this. The automation can make your deployments faster, and can reduce the errors you face during deployment.
- “Infrastructure as a Code” is like a blueprint of your infrastructure. Every time you run it, its going to provision your infrastructure in the same manner, irrespective of the environment. This brings consistency to your runtime environments.
All these characteristics make “Infrastructure as a Code”, a great framework for the DevOps pipelines.
With the help of this, you can provision and replicate, the required infrastructure, at any stage. Be it dev, testing, production, disaster recovery, etcetera. This increases your DevOps efficiency, and also enables you to implement advanced features, such as rollbacks, blue-green deployments, canary deployments, and many more.
I have created the AWS Cloudformation 101 video on youtube. Feel free to explore and share.
Popular Tools
Here are some of the popular IaC tools available in the market — Terraform, Chef, Puppet, Saltstack and AWS CloudFormation.
AWS Cloudformation is provided by AWS. It primarily helps you to provision AWS resources like EC2, S3, etc., with the help of template style code.
