AWS CloudFormation
AWS Tutorial: AWS CloudFormation
Welcome to the AWS CloudFormation lesson. While Elastic Beanstalk is great for simple web apps, CloudFormation is the heavy-duty tool required to build enterprise-scale infrastructure.
Why Learn CloudFormation?
CloudFormation enables "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC). This means your entire IT architecture is tracked in version control (like Git) exactly the same way your software code is. It allows you to replicate identical production environments across the world in minutes.
Tutorial Overview
In this tutorial, you will learn:
- What Infrastructure as Code (IaC) means.
- How CloudFormation Templates and Stacks work.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Instead of clicking through the AWS console to set up networks, security rules, and servers, you write a text file (in JSON or YAML format) describing exactly what you want.
- The Template: The JSON or YAML file you write. It is completely declarative. You simply declare what you want (e.g., "I want an EC2 instance and an S3 bucket"), and AWS figures out how to build it.
- The Stack: When you submit your Template to CloudFormation, it reads the file and builds all the resources. The resulting collection of active AWS resources is called a "Stack". If you delete the Stack, CloudFormation safely tears down every single resource associated with it.
Exercise
?In AWS CloudFormation, what is the name of the active collection of AWS resources that are generated from your JSON/YAML template?