AWS CloudFormation allows you to model and set up Amazon Web Services resources, so you can spend more time on AWS-based applications and less time managing them. CloudFormation creates a template that outlines all the AWS resources you need (such as Amazon EC2 instances and Amazon RDS DB instance instances). Then, CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and configuration. CloudFormation takes care of all the configuration and creation of AWS resources.
Overview of AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation, an Amazon service, assists customers in setting-up and modeling AWS resources. It allows you to spend less time managing AWS resources and more energy on the apps that use AWS. It aims to provide the best possible service for AWS resources’ provisioning and configuration.
AWS CloudFormation does everything automatically so you don’t have to do anything. This post will explain AWS CloudFormation and show you how it works. Let’s get started:
CloudFormation: Why is it so important?
This AWS service is required to launch an instance.
LoadBalancers can be easily created.
It can be used to make required installations
It is used to attach an instance to the LoadBalancers.
To create RDS and configure the EC2 security groups, DBSecurity, DBSubnet, and DBParameter groups.
It can also be used to create & configure security groups
It is also used to create auto-scaling groups
AWS CloudFormation’s Drawbacks
Incomplete Modelling Despite the claim on the AWS service presentation site that AWS CloudFormation offers complete cloud infrastructure modeling, it is not true.
Time-consuming It is impossible to verify a template 100% locally. The only way to ensure that the template is syntactic correct is to actually execute it. This means that you will need to put in a lot of work before you can get a working copy. Each one will take a while to complete.
Unintelligible errorsError message are often pointless, misleading, ineffective, ineffective, incorrect, or just plain wrong. One thing is certain: The stack failed. It is just as important to understand what went wrong and why it happened as it is to solve the problem.
Cloudformation drift detectionMany customers requested AWS CloudFormation’s drift detection. This is a feature that allows you to automatically detect changes in the configuration of stack resources, outside of CloudFormation, via the AWS management console and the CLI.
AWS CloudFormation Features
Templates
A CloudFormation template refers to a text file formatted in JSON and YAML. These files can be saved with any extension, including.json,.yaml,.template, and.txt. These templates can be used as blueprints to create AWS resources in CloudFormation. You can include information about Amazon EC2 instances in a template. This includes the instance type, AMI ID and block device mappings. The name of the Amazon EC2 key couple. CloudFormation uses the template you provide to create a stack.
If you use the following template to generate a stack, CloudFormation will create an instance with the AMI ID ami-0ff8a91507f77f867, the t2.micro instance type, the testkey key pair name, and an Amazon EBS volume.
Stacks
CloudFormation allows you to manage connected resources as one unit, called a stack. You can create, update, or remove stacks to manage a collection of resources. CloudFormation templates for stacks define all resources within the stack. Let’s say you have an Auto Scaling group and an Elastic Load Balancer load balancer. You also have an Amazon Relational Database Service database instance in your template. CloudFormation creates a stack for you by simply submitting the template.
Change Sets
If you have to make changes to the stack’s running resources, you can update it. Before making any changes to your resources, you can create a “changeset”, which is a summary or list of the proposed modifications. You can use changesets before you make any changes to your resources. If you haven’t already backed-up the data in your old database, you will lose it. You’ll notice that an update to your database will result in a changeset.
How do I install AWS CloudFormation
Follow these steps to install the AWS CloudFormation.
Step 1: Choose a template
You will need a template to describe the resources you want to include in your stack. This stage will be used a pre-made template. The template creates a basic WordPress site that uses an Amazon EC2 instance and a local MySQL database to store data. The template also creates an Amazon EC2 security team to manage firewall settings for the Amazon EC2 instance.
Step 2: Make sure that you have all the necessary items ready for the stack
Before you create a stack using a template, ensure that all the template’s dependent resources are available. A template can be used to refer to both current AWS resources as well as resources that are already in use. CloudFormation inspects the references to resources in the template and existing resource references to ensure that they are present in the area where the stack will be created. If your template is dependent on a resource, stack construction will fail.