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Module 11 Summary
William Anderson
Delgado Community College
CNET 294: Cloud Architecture
Professor Alex McMillen
November 3, 2024
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Module 11 Summary
CloudFormation is a service that lets you set up AWS resources in a more automated
way. You define what you need in a template. This could be servers or storage or databases.
Then, CloudFormation uses that template to create everything you specified as a single stack.
First, you make a template that describes the resources you want. This could be your own
template or a prebuilt one. After that, you upload the template to CloudFormation or link it from
Amazon S3. Then you run "create stack," which puts together all the resources and gets them
running in your account as one setup.
The template can be written in either JSON or YAML. YAML is more readable with less
extra stuff. JSON works better if you need it to connect with other systems. The main section in
the template is "Resources," which defines what’s being created. Other sections, like
"Parameters" or "Conditions," are extra and let you customize things even more. AWS also has a
tool called Designer. It’s a drag-and-drop interface that helps you create or edit templates
without needing to write all the code.
After the stack is created, there are options to update the stack if you need to add new
resources, detect drift to check if anything was changed outside CloudFormation, or delete the
stack to remove the resources. Drift detection is handy because it tells you if someone made
changes in AWS that don’t match the template. You can also set up a DeletionPolicy for
resources. This means they’ll be saved or backed up when you delete the stack.
Another tool, AWS Quick Starts, provides pre-built templates designed by AWS experts.
These templates help you set up common solutions fast, like creating an app in the cloud. They
follow AWS’s best practices for security and work well for testing things without starting from
scratch