CloudFormation vs Ansible / Terraform

  • CloudFormation being AWS native will always containt the latest features and options for AWS services

  • CloudFormation is state based, AWS figures out how best to reach that state

  • Ansible and Terraform are instrution based, so it can be difficult to fully orchestrate stacks

  • Ansible and Terraform have to be updated each a new service or API is released, which can take a long time

YAML

  • Key - Value pairs

  • Nested objects (tab)

  • Supports arrays (-)

  • Multi line strings (|)

  • Coments (#)

Updates

  • Update with no interruption

  • Replacement updates

Template Options

  • Tags (up to 50)

  • Permissions (IAM role that creates the CloudFormation resources)

  • Notification Options (SNS Topic)

  • Timeouts (in minutes)

  • Rollback configuration (Specify alarms for CloudFormation to monitor when creating and updating the stack.)

  • Rollback on Failure (Yes/No)

  • Stack Policy (Defines the resources that you want to protect from unintentional updates during a stack update.)

CloudFormation Designer

Building Blocks

Components

  1. Resources: your AWS resources declared in the template

  2. Parameters: the dynamic inputs for your template

  3. Mappings: the static variables for your template

  4. Outputs: References to what has been created

  5. Conditionals: List of conditions to perform resource creation

  6. Metadata

Template Helpers

  1. References

  2. Functions

Parameters

  • Type

    • String

    • Number

    • CommaDelimitedList

    • List

    • AWS Parameter (to catch invalid values, match against exiting AWS account values)

  • Description

  • Constraints

  • Constraint Description (String)

  • Min/MaxLength

  • Min/MaxValue

  • Defaults

  • AllowedValues (array)

  • AllowPattern (regexp)

  • NoEcho (Boolean)

0-parameters-hands-on.yaml

  • Fn:Ref == ! Ref, function reference parameters or other elements in the template

Resources

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