#cloudformation | AWS CloudFormation (2)

Infrastructure as Code to provision and maintain AWS resources.

AWS CloudFormation Update Evaluation - YAML, Cross-Stack References, Simplified Substitution

In mid-September, AWS released a big update to CloudFormation. The update contained: YAML Support – You can now write your CloudFormation templates in YAML. Cross Stack References – You can now export values from one stack and use them in another. Simp...

Read more

Pitfall: ACM Certificate with CloudFormation

Good news, CloudFormation added support for AWS Certificate Manager recently. Creating a CloudFront distribution which is using an ACM certificate is finally possible with CloudFromation as well. The following listing shows the definition of an ACM cert...

Read more

Reference API Gateway Models in CloudFormation

API Gateway Models are defined using JSON Schema. You can reference a Model inside another Model using the $ref field. If you are familiar with the OpenAPI Specification fka Swagger, you may have seen something like this: { "$ref": "#/definitions/...

Read more

API Gateway Custom Authorization with Lambda, DynamoDB and CloudFormation

API Gateway provides an HTTP API endpoint that is fully configurable. You define the HTTP resources (like /user), the HTTP methods on that resources (like POST, GET, DELETE, …) and the integration (e.g. Lambda function) that should be called to process ...

Read more

Your AWS Account is a mess? Learn how to fix it!

Have you no wildcard ec2:* in your IAM policies? Your Security Group rules are as strict as possible? Your S3 Bucket Access Policies only contain rules you know? You know about every single resource that runs in your account? If so, stop reading and ple...

Read more

Create a serverless RESTful API with API Gateway, CloudFormation, Lambda, and DynamoDB

This article teaches you how to create a serverless RESTful API on AWS. You will use CloudFormation to define the API Gateway in combination with Lambda to implement the functionality. DynamoDB is used to store the data. The example’s source code is ava...

Read more

The Life of a Serverless Microservice on AWS

In this post, I will demonstrate how you can develop, test, deploy and operate a production-ready Serverless Microservice using the AWS ecosystem. The combination of AWS Lambda and Amazon API Gateway allows us to operate a REST endpoint without the need...

Read more

New CloudFormation Templates - NAT Gateway, Static website, Security

We released four new CloudFormation templates. Using our Infrastructure as Code templates will help you to bootstrap common setups on Amazon Web Services (AWS) within minutes. Our templates are exclusively designed for AWS CloudFormation, the Infrastruc...

Read more

Security Templates for AWS CloudFormation

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/security

Read more

Optional Parameter in CloudFormation

Sometimes you want a CloudFormation Parameter to be optional. Unfortunately a blank Parameter contains an empty string. If you pass this empty string to e.g. the KeyName Property of an EC2 Instance or Launch Configuration you end up with a validation er...

Read more

Rolling Update with AWS CloudFormation

Updating all EC2 instances in an Auto Scaling Group becomes complex and expensive when done manually. If you follow the immutable infrastructure approach you will roll out a new version by creating new EC2 instances. You never change the old instances. ...

Read more

Static Website Templates for AWS CloudFormation

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/static-website

Read more

VPC Templates for AWS CloudFormation

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/vpc

Read more

5 AWS mistakes you should avoid

Since this year I’m working as an AWS Cloud Consultant where I see a lot of small to medium sized AWS deployments. Most of them are typical web applications. I want to share with you the 5 most common mistakes that you better avoid: managing infrastruc...

Read more

Serverless image resizing at any scale

This post demonstrates how you can create a bunch of resized images right after uploading an image to S3. The solution requires no servers, is scalable and can be automatically deployed within minutes. The solution makes use of two S3 buckets: The b...

Read more

High availability is a no-brainer: EC2 auto-recovery

Werner Vogels (CTO of AWS) is quoted with “Everything fails all the time.”. This does not mean AWS is an unreliable cloud provider. Quite the contrary: AWS plans for failure. All services are highly available or fault tolerant. Some of them by default, ...

Read more

EC2 Templates for AWS CloudFormation

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/ec2

Read more

WordPress on AWS: you are holding it wrong

WordPress is a very popular blogging software. You can run the PHP application together with a MySQL database on an EC2 instance (virtual machine) easily. But if you are following the official tutorial to setup your blogging environment on AWS you are m...

Read more

WordPress Templates for AWS CloudFormation

This page has moved to GitHub: https://github.com/widdix/aws-cf-templates/tree/master/wordpress

Read more

CloudFormation vs Engineers: How to protect your CloudFormation managed AWS account from human intervention

To eliminate human error as much as possible I advised you to follow the idea of Infrastructure as Code implemented by AWS CloudFormation. Changes to your infrastructure like launching a new virtual server or making changes to a firewall configuration a...

Read more