AWS CloudFormation
As I’m building more complex applications to be hosted on AWS, it’s becoming tedious to manually configure the same thing over and over again. This is especially the case when a project requires multiple environments such as production, staging and development.
For this Amazon provide an automation tool named CloudFormation which scripts the architecture to make orchestration easier and less repetitive. The script almost anything that can be manually done through the web console, but commonly includes things such as:
- EC2 image settings such as type, size and startup scripts
- Load balancer configuration
- Security groups
- Databases (along with users and passwords)
- S3 buckets
Like any infrastructure as code language or configuration management tool, CloudFormation scripts are great to ensure things are built exactly as intended without forgetting anything, but can also be reused for other projects.
The learning curve is a little slow but there are a lot of examples online to learn from and knowing how to build things using the console makes the transition to CloudFormation straight forward.
I think that if you’re building systems on AWS regularly, it’s worthwhile in getting your head around CloudFormation as it will streamline your work and ensure integrity in your systems.
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