This week we’re going to talk about CloudFormation which is what we talked about in last week’s Elastic Beanstalk blog that is used under the hood. After that, I also have a small introduction to CloudFront. Before I spoil anything else, let’s get started.

CloudFormation

This week we’re going to talk about CloudFormation in AWS.

What is CloudFormation? It way for declaring what AWS infrastructure you want provision in a template. We can create, configure and delete AWS components and also reference them with each other.

The format is AWS::Lambda::Function or AWS::EC2::Instance

CloudFormation supports most AWS services and the full list can be found here

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-template-resource-type-ref.html

CloudFormation Parameters and more

Let’s talk about AWS CloudFormation parameters

• We can specify inputs insure our templates which are great for reusing templates and values of services that we want to use after they are created
• That way we won’t have to re-upload templates all the time.

Referencing

We can use referencing for using params anywhere within the template

The API name is Fn:Ref and in the yaml config it is shortened to !Ref