© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.

Abhishek Lal, Product Manager

Chris Whitaker, Development Manager

October 2015

DVO304

AWS CloudFormation Best

Practices

AWS CloudFormation

Create templates of the infrastructure

CloudFormation provisions AWS resources in order

Version control/replicate/update with infrastructure-as-code

Integrates with development, CI/CD, management tools

AWS CloudFormation Designer

Introducing AWS CloudFormation Designer

• Visualize template

resources

• Modify template with drag-

and-drop gestures

• Customize sample

templates

AWS CloudFormation Designer

demo – Visualize templates

AWS CloudFormation Designer

– Make updates

AWS CloudFormation Designer

– Authoring

CloudFormation Designer toolbar

Toolbar Navigation

Open: Local files/S3/stack

Save: Local files/launch stack

Validation: AWS resource

schema

Refresh: Synchronize JSON

text changes

CloudFormation Designer Resources

All supported resources

Organized by service

Drag and drop onto canvas

Color-coded icons

CloudFormation Designer canvas

Container Resources

e.g. EC2 VPCs, subnets

Connections between

resources

e.g. Ref, DependsOn, GetAtt

Contextual Resource menu

Code/Clone/Delete/Docs

CloudFormation Designer JSON Editor

Ctrl+Space : Within the Properties key of a

resource, lists all the available properties

for the resource

Ctrl+F : Search for a value in the JSON

editor.

Ctrl+\ : Formats the text with proper

indentation and new lines

Ctrl+Shift+\ : Removes all white space

New AWS Services Supported

by AWS CloudFormation

Use a wide range of AWS services

Amazon EC2

Amazon EC2 Container Service

AWS Lambda (including event sources – New)

Auto Scaling (including Spot Fleet - New)

Amazon VPC

Elastic Load Balancing

Amazon Route 53

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon SimpleDB

Amazon RDS

Amazon Redshift

Amazon DynamoDB

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon RDS for Aurora (New)

Amazon S3

AWS IAM (including managed policies)

Simple AD (New)

Amazon Kinesis

Amazon SNS

Amazon SQS

AWS CloudTrail

Amazon CloudWatch

AWS Data Pipeline

AWS Elastic Beanstalk

AWS OpsWorks

AWS CodeDeploy (New)

Amazon WorkSpaces (New)

AWS CloudFormation in Your

Organization

Managing your costs with budgets

https://console.aws.amazon.com/billing/home?region=us-east-1/budgets#/

ow.ly/T84qv

Audit logs for all operationsStore/ Archive

Troubleshoot

Monitor and Alarm

You are making API

calls...

On a growing set of AWS

services around the world...

CloudTrail is continuously

recording API calls

AWS CloudFormation Advanced

Concepts

AWS CloudFormation language features

Extending AWS CloudFormation

Security group

Auto Scaling group

EC2

instance

Elastic Load

Balancing

ElastiCache

Memcached cluster

Software pkgs,

config, & dataCloudWatch

alarmsWeb Analytics

ServiceAWS

CloudFormation

Provision

AWS resources

“Create, Update,

Rollback, or Delete”

Extend with stack events

Worker

Amazon

SNS Topic

Stack Events

Security group

Auto Scaling group

EC2

instance

Elastic Load

Balancing

ElastiCache

Memcached cluster

Software pkgs,

config, & dataCloudWatch

alarmsWeb Analytics

ServiceAWS

CloudFormation

Provision

AWS Resources

"Resources" : {

"WebAnalyticsTrackingID" : {

"Type" : "Custom::WebAnalyticsService::TrackingID",

"Properties" : {

"ServiceToken" : "arn:aws:sns:...",

"Target" : {"Fn::GetAtt" : ["LoadBalancer", "DNSName"]},

"Plan" : "Gold"

}

},

...

“Success” + Metadata

“Create, Update, Rollback, or Delete”

+ Metadata

Extend with custom resources

ow.ly/DiSXp

AWS Lambda-backed custom resources

Security group

Auto Scaling group

EC2

instance

Elastic Load

Balancing

ElastiCache

memcached cluster

Software pkgs,

config, & dataCloudWatch

alarms

Your AWS CloudFormation stack

// Implement custom logic here

Look up an AMI ID

Your AWS Lambda functions

Look up an VPC ID and Subnet ID

Reverse an IP address

Lambda-powered

custom resources

Security Best Practices

Security – Restricting user access

• Only allow specific templates and stack policies

{

"Effect":"Allow”,

"Action":[

"cloudformation:CreateStack",

"cloudformation:UpdateStack”

],

"Condition":{

"ForAllValues:StringLike":{

"cloudformation:TemplateUrl":

["https://.amazonaws.com/TestBucket/*"]

}

}

}

{

"Effect":"Allow”,

"Action":[

"cloudformation:UpdateStack”

],

"Condition":{

"ForAllValues:StringEquals":{

"cloudformation:StackPolicyUrl":

["https://.amazonaws.com/TestBucket/Foo.json"]

}

}

}

Security – Restricting user access

• Only allow specific resource types

{

"Effect":"Allow”,

"Action":[

"cloudformation:CreateStack”

],

"Condition":{

"ForAllValues:StringEquals":{

"cloudformation:ResourceType":

[”AWS::EC2::Instance”…]

}

}

}

{

"Effect":"Allow”,

"Action":[

"cloudformation:CreateStack”

]

},

{

"Effect":”Deny”,

"Action":[

"cloudformation:CreateStack”

]

"Condition":{

"ForAnyValue:StringLike":{

"cloudformation:ResourceType":

[”AWS::IAM::*"]

}

}

}

Security – Controlling resource types

• Programmatically restrict access to resource types

• CreateStack and UpdateStack take a new parameter

• Restrict the set of resources that can be created

• Independent of any user policies

$ aws cloudformation create-stack … --resource-types=“[AWS::EC2::*, AWS::RDS::DBInstance, Custom::MyCustomResource]”

Best Practices for Templates

Reusing templates across AWS regions

• Consider environmental or regional differences

• Amazon EC2 image IDs

• VPC environment or “classic” environment

• Available instance types

• IAM policy principals

• Endpoint names

• Amazon Resource Names (ARNs)

Reusable templates – “Pseudo-parameters”

Use “pseudo-parameters” to retrieve

environmental data

• Account ID

• Region

• Stack Name and ID

"LogsBucketPolicy": {"Type": "AWS::S3::BucketPolicy","Properties": {

"Bucket": {"Ref": "LogsBucket”},"PolicyDocument": {

"Version": "2008-10-17","Statement": [{"Sid": "ELBAccessLogs","Effect": "Allow","Resource": {"Fn::Join": [ "", [ “arn:aws:s3:::",

{ "Ref": "LogsBucket" }, "/", "Logs", "/AWSLogs/", { "Ref": "AWS::AccountId" }, "/*”

] ]},"Principal": …,"Action": [ "s3:PutObject" ]

}

Reusable templates – Using mappings

Use mappings to define variables

• Single place for configuration

• Reusable within the template"LogsBucketPolicy": {"Type": "AWS::S3::BucketPolicy","Properties": {

"Bucket": {"Ref": "LogsBucket”},"PolicyDocument": {"Version": "2008-10-17","Statement": [{

"Sid": "ELBAccessLogs","Effect": "Allow","Resource": {"Fn::Join": [ "", [

{ "Fn::FindInMap" : ["RegionalConfig", {"Ref" : "AWS::Region"},"ArnPrefix”]},

"s3:::”, { "Ref": "LogsBucket" }, "/", "Logs", "/AWSLogs/”,

{ "Ref": "AWS::AccountId" }, "/*" ] ]},"Principal": {"AWS": { "Fn::FindInMap": [ "RegionalConfig",

{ "Ref": "AWS::Region" },”ELBAccountId" ] } },

"Action": [ "s3:PutObject" ]}]

“Mappings” : {“RegionalConfig” : {

“us-east-1” : {“AMI” : “ami-

12345678”,”ELBAccountId":

"127311923021”,“ArnPrefix” :

“arn:aws:”},“us-west-1” : {

“AMI” : “ami-98765432””ELBAccountId":

“027434742980"“ArnPrefix” :

“arn:aws:”},:

}}

Re-usable Templates – Using conditionals

Use conditionals to customize

resources and parameters

"DBEC2SG": {"Type": "AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup","Condition" : "Is-EC2-VPC","Properties" : {

:}

},

"DBSG": {"Type": "AWS::RDS::DBSecurityGroup","Condition" : "Is-EC2-Classic","Properties": {

:}

},

"MySQLDatabase": {"Type": "AWS::RDS::DBInstance","Properties": {

:"VPCSecurityGroups": { "Fn::If" : [ "Is-EC2-VPC",

[ { "Fn::GetAtt": [ "DBEC2SG", "GroupId" ] } ],

{ "Ref" : "AWS::NoValue"}]},

"DBSecurityGroups": { "Fn::If" : [ "Is-EC2-Classic", [ { "Ref": "DBSG" } ],{ "Ref" :

"AWS::NoValue"}]}

"Conditions" : {"Is-EC2-VPC” : { "Fn::Or" : [

{"Fn::Equals" : [{"Ref" : "AWS::Region"}, "eu-central-1" ]},

{"Fn::Equals" : [{"Ref" : "AWS::Region"}, "cn-north-1" ]}]},

"Is-EC2-Classic" : { "Fn::Not" : [{ "Condition" : "Is-EC2-VPC"}]}},

Thank you!

Abhishek Lal, Product Manager

Chris Whitaker, Development Manager

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