Amazon Web Services: Cloudformation

In this blog, we will discuss Cloudformation.
cloudformation helps in codifying creation of stack of resources.

What are stack of resources? A stack could be:

• ELB
• Auto scaling group
• EC2
• RDS (Database)
• All connections between them

There are many benefits of cloudformation, namely:

1. Your infrastructure as a code
2. can be version controlled
3. Modularization ( templates can contain other templates)
4. Enforce one way to deploy
5. Cost nothing

Signing up with Cloudformation means signing up with AWS services that Cloudformation can create

With Cloudformation you can setup billing alarms. To learn how to setup billing alarms go to

https://portal.aws.amazon.com/gp/aws/developer/account?ie=UTF8&action=billing-alerts 

There are 200-300 pre-packaged amazon templates available. The templates are JSON based. The templates can accespt run-time parameter [Instance type (small for test), Kep pair (prod vs Test)]

Templates can also update running stack

Templates have 7 section

• version
• description
• parameters
• mapping
• resources
• properties
• output

The link for templates is

http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/aws-cloudformation-templates/