#cloudformation | AWS CloudFormation (1)

Infrastructure as Code to provision and maintain AWS resources.

Optional DependsOn with CloudFormation: Metadata to the rescue

When working with AWS CloudFormation, sometimes it’s necessary to incorporate optional dependencies into your template. Recently, I encountered a situation where I had to build a single CloudFormation template to manage both a VPC and an application—tho...

CloudFormation cfn-init pitfall: Auto scaling and throttling error rate exceeded

cfn-init is a little helper to install and configure EC2 instances managed with CloudFormation. Lately, I was running into issues when starting a more significant amount of EC2 (let’s say 50) during an auto scaling event. This blog post will teach you w...

Selling an AMI and a CloudFormation template as an alternative to SaaS

We have been selling software through AWS Marketplace since 2019. Selling SaaS is very popular nowadays, and most software vendors are moving to this model. However, we learned that there is a promising alternative to SaaS: Selling software bundled into...

Automate CloudFormation StackSets with CloudFormation

CloudFormation StackSets rollout CloudFormation stacks to all or some of your AWS accounts. Also, stack sets allow you to deploy stacks to multiple regions. Therefore, CloudFormation stack sets are a great way to deploy baseline configurations to multip...

Getting Started with Free Templates for AWS CloudFormation

Writing CloudFormation templates from scratch is a lot of work. You will run into many issues along the way: the documentation is incomplete, magic values are required, unsupported combinations of attributes, etc. The feedback cycles are long. In the en...

3½ ways to workaround missing CloudFormation support

Are you following the Infrastructure as Code approach using CloudFormation? If so, I bet you encountered a situation where CloudFormation misses support for a service’s latest features. I run into those issues weekly! So what can we do about it? Do yo...

Prevent CloudFormation Change Sets from piling up

Recently, I’ve stumbled upon a problem when using aws cloudformation deploy within deployment pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, …) that I wanted to share with you. Usually, I’m using the AWS CLI to deploy CloudFormation stacks. aws cloudformation package ...

How to create a customized CloudWatch Dashboard with CloudFormation

Which metrics are essential to evaluate the state of your cloud infrastructure? Probably a lot. A dashboard allows you to keep an eye on all these metrics. For example, I like to monitor the following metrics for a typical 3-tier web application with th...

6 unknown CloudFormation features you should know about

I was recently invited to a CloudFormation workshop with a group of early CloudFormation users. I soon realized that the group had a good understanding of the basics, so I started to introduce more advanced features. Today, I would like to share with y...

Rapid CloudFormation: cfn-modules

Today, we release a new open source project to make your CloudFormation live easier. We promise rapid CloudFormation with cfn-modules. Our modules provide common building blocks to automate your infrastructure with plain CloudFormation templates. Why c...

Configure your CloudFormation managed infrastructure with Parameter Store and CodePipeline

Getting started with CI/CD to manage your AWS infrastructure is hard: You have to familiarize yourself with the available technologies. You have to create a Proof of Concept to show your team how it works. You have to convince your team to stop using t...

New CloudFormation Templates - Store your state

We help numerous clients to automate AWS with the help of CloudFormation. As you can imagine, we can reuse CloudFormation templates across clients. The template library comes with several advantages: Higher quality: we continuously improve the template...

Engaging your users with AWS Step Functions

Imagine a new user signs up for your service. You send an automated welcome message to your new user explaining how the service works. But what if your user struggles with the first steps? You want to send a second email with additional information. To ...

The Cloud Switch: IoT Button, Lambda, and CloudFormation

Last one out turns off the light. What works for boring light bulbs can be adopted to your cloud infrastructure as well. Are you using a development and testing environment that is only used during working hours? Why not turning off the cloud infrastruc...

CloudFormation vs Terraform in 2022

The most reliable way to automate creating, updating, and deleting your cloud resources is to describe the target state of your infrastructure and use a tool to apply it to the current state of your infrastructure (see Understanding Infrastructure as Co...

Maintaining an Open Source library of production-ready CloudFormation templates

CloudFormation is the standard to provision AWS resources. But developing a template is a lot of work. Let’s speed up development and maintenance by working together on high-quality templates: reviewed by experts secure highly available scalable easy t...

Painlessly create or update a CloudFormation stack in an idempotent way

When integrating CloudFormation into your CI/CD pipeline you are faced with the challenge of creating a CloudFormation stack on the first run of the pipeline, while you need to update the stack for all following pipeline runs. If you use the AWS CLI thi...

AWS Velocity Series: CI/CD Pipeline as Code

The Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment pipeline is a major section of your software assembly line. It starts with the code repository and ends with the deployment into your production environment. CI/CD includes many steps that all depend on...

Delivery Pipeline as Code: AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline

The assembly line is the heart of any factory. Workers and supervisors are giving their best to ensure a steady flow of raw materials to the end products. The delivery pipeline is an important part of DevOps and the equivalent to the assembly line. A de...

AWS Advent has started: Deploy your AWS Infrastructure Continuously

AWS Advent is a yearly exploration of AWS in 24 parts contributed by volunteers from the AWS community. Follow @AWSAdvent and get inspired on a daily basis. I open this year’s AWS Advent with a post on Deploy your AWS Infrastructure Continuously Conti...