Harnessing the Potential of IaC with AWS CloudFormation Templates
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Overcoming the challenges of manual IT infrastructure management is essential for business success. When you deploy more than just a handful of services or applications on AWS, you will quickly discover that it is tedious and time-consuming to set each one up manually. Not to mention, having to configure each AWS resource by hand also leaves you at a much higher risk of making errors or introducing inconsistencies. As cloud computing continues to evolve, one practice has become increasingly vital: Infrastructure as Code (IaC). Among the numerous tools available for implementing IaC, AWS CloudFormation stands out as a robust versatile option. CloudFormation is an infrastructure automation platform for AWS that deploys AWS resources in a repeatable, testable and auditable manner. This blog post delves into the advantages of using AWS CloudFormation templates to define and manage your entire AWS infrastructure in code, enabling repeatable deployments and version control.
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What is Infrastructure as Code (IaC)?
Infrastructure as Code is the practice of managing and provisioning computing infrastructure through machine-readable configuration files, rather than through physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. This approach allows for more consistent and reliable infrastructure management, reducing the risk of human error and making deployments faster and more scalable.
Introducing AWS CloudFormation
​AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps you model and set up your Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications. It can also be described as infrastructure automation or Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool and a cloud automation solution because it can automate the setup and deployment of various Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings on the AWS CloudFormation supports virtually every service that runs in AWS. CloudFormation enables you to define your infrastructure as code using JSON or YAML templates. CloudFormation supports templates that are formatted using either JSON or YAML. These are widely used file formats for structuring text files. Most other IaC tools use the same formatting languages, as do platforms like Kubernetes.
Advantages of Using AWS CloudFormation Templates
1- Consistent and Repeatable Deployments: It is worth noting that CloudFormation is not the only way to configure and deploy services on AWS. You can handle these processes manually using the AWS command-line interface, API, or Web console. Manual provisioning is the approach that teams typically take when they are just getting started with AWS and learning how to deploy services. However, as they scale their environments up in size, many teams quickly realize that they need a solution like CloudFormation to make the deployment process faster and more consistent.
One of the primary benefits of using CloudFormation is the ability to create consistent and repeatable deployments. By defining your infrastructure in the template to manage how AWS resources are configured and deployed, you can ensure that every time you deploy, the environment will be set up in exactly the same way. You can deploy multiple instances of the same resources almost instantaneously using just one template. This consistency is crucial for maintaining the reliability and performance of your applications and it leads to much faster deployment than you could achieve if you had to manually set up each deployment by running commands on the CLI or pressing buttons in the AWS console.
2- Version Control and Change Management: In some cases, you might have underlying resources that you want to upgrade incrementally. For example, you might change to a higher performing instance type in your Auto Scaling launch configuration so that you can reduce the maximum number of instances in your Auto Scaling group. If problems occur after you complete the update, you might need to roll back your infrastructure to the original settings. To do this manually, you not only have to remember which resources were changed, you also have to know what the original settings were.
When you provision your infrastructure with CloudFormation, the CloudFormation template describes exactly what resources are provisioned and their settings. Because these templates are text files, you simply track differences in your templates to track changes to your infrastructure, similar to the way developers control revisions to source code. For example, you can use a version control system with your templates so that you know exactly what changes were made, who made them, and when. If at any point you need to reverse changes to your infrastructure, you can use a previous version of your template.
This enables you to track changes to your infrastructure over time, revert to previous versions if needed, and collaborate more effectively with your team. Change tracking in CloudFormation means that you will be able to determine how your AWS services and resources have changed over time without looking through logs to reconstruct the timeline of updates. The ability to version control your infrastructure setup is a powerful feature that brings the same rigor and discipline of software development to infrastructure management.
3- Automated and Simplified Resource Management: CloudFormation simplifies the management of AWS resources by automating the provisioning and updating processes. Once you define your resources in a template, CloudFormation handles the creation, deletion, and updating of these resources. When you use that template to create an AWS CloudFormation stack, CloudFormation provisions the Auto Scaling group, load balancer, and database for you. After the stack has been successfully created, your AWS resources are up and running. You can delete the stack just as easily, which deletes all the resources in the stack. By using CloudFormation, you easily manage a collection of resources as a single unit.
In addition to deploying new resources, you can apply changes to existing resources with AWS CloudFormation templates. This ability simplifies the process of, for example, adding more storage to a fleet of ec2 instances or changing access control rules. This automation reduces manual intervention and the potential for configuration drift, ensuring that your infrastructure remains in the desired state.
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4- Infrastructure Scalability: AWS CloudFormation templates can be parameterized, allowing you to create flexible and scalable infrastructure setups. You can define parameters that can be adjusted at deployment time, making it easy to scale your infrastructure up or down based on your application’s requirements. By keeping AWS CloudFormation templates on hand, you will know that you can add more virtual machine instances or storage space, for example, at a moment's notice if your applications experience increased traffic and you need to scale your environment up.
Alternatively, when demand decreases and you want to scale down to save money, you can take some of your deployments offline while still retaining the ability to redeploy them quickly using CloudFormation when demand increases.
This flexibility is especially useful in dynamic environments where resource demands can change rapidly.
5- AWS CloudFormation for Enhanced Security and Compliance: Unlike AWS Security or AWS WAF, CloudFormation is not a security tool per se, it can improve the overall security of your AWS environment by reducing the risk of oversights or human errors that could turn into breaches. Using CloudFormation helps enhance security and compliance by enabling you to codify your infrastructure policies and practices. You can enforce best practices and compliance requirements across all your environments by embedding security configurations directly into your templates. This approach reduces the risk of misconfigurations and ensures that your infrastructure adheres to industry standards and regulations.
As long as you design your AWS CloudFormation templates to be secure, you do not need to worry that an engineer who deploys resources will forget to turn on important access control, for example, or leave data exposed to unrestricted, public access.
6- Cross-Account and Cross-Region Deployments: CloudFormation supports cross-account and cross-region deployments, allowing you to manage a global infrastructure footprint with ease. By defining your resources in a template, you can deploy identical setups in multiple AWS accounts and regions, ensuring consistency and simplifying global infrastructure management. If your application requires additional availability, you might replicate it in multiple regions so that if one region becomes unavailable, your users can still use your application in other regions. The challenge in replicating your application is that it also requires you to replicate your resources. Not only do you need to record all the resources that your application requires, but you must also provision and configure those resources in each region.
Reuse your CloudFormation template to create your resources in a consistent and repeatable manner. To reuse your template, describe your resources once and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple regions.
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Conclusion
Manually setting up and deploying AWS resources is an unproductive use of your team's time. It also increases the risk of configuration oversights and inconsistencies that can lead to management problems and security risks. Furthermore, it makes it harder to update or scale resources quickly.
AWS CloudFormation empowers organizations to manage their infrastructure with the same principles and practices used in software development. By defining and managing your AWS resources in code, you can achieve greater consistency, scalability, security, and control over your infrastructure. Whether you are a small startup or a large enterprise, embracing infrastructure as code with AWS CloudFormation can streamline your operations and accelerate your cloud journey.
About The Author
Pouya Nourizadeh
AWS Enterprise Solutions Architect
Founder, Bringdev
