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AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C02)

CloudFormation

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC) allows us to write our infrastructure as a config file which can be easily replicated & versioned using Git
  • Declarative way of outlining your AWS Infrastructure (no need to specify ordering and orchestration)
  • Resources within a stack is tagged with an identifier (easy to track cost of each stack)
  • Ability to destroy and re-create infrastructure on the fly
  • Deleting a stack deletes every single artifact that was created by CloudFormation (clean way of deleting resources)

CloudFormation Templates

  • YAML file that defines a CloudFormation Stack
  • Templates have to be uploaded in S3 and then referenced in CloudFormation
  • To update a template, upload a new version of the template
  • Template components:
    • Resources: AWS resources declared in the template (mandatory)
    • Parameters: Dynamic inputs for your template
    • Mappings: Static variables for your template
    • Outputs: References to what has been created (will be returned upon stack creation)
    • Conditionals: List of conditions to perform resource creation
    • Metadata
  • Templates helpers:
    • References
    • Functions
  • You can associate the CreationPolicy attribute with a resource to prevent its status from reaching create complete until CloudFormation receives a specified number of cfn-signal or the timeout period is exceeded.
  • Use CloudFormation with securely configured templates to ensure that applications are deployed in secure configurations

Stack Sets

  • Create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation
  • When you update a stack set, all associated stack instances are updated throughout all accounts and regions.

Updating Stacks

  • CloudFormation provides two methods for updating stacks:
    • Direct update
      • CloudFormation immediately deploys the submitted changes. You cannot preview the changes.
    • Change Sets
      • You can preview the changes CloudFormation will make to your stack, and then decide whether to apply those changes.

Last updated: 2022-05-20