A very quick introduction to the pain of AWS CloudFormation

One of the main reasons IT has run like a dangerous road is that infrastructure historically was provisioned manually. However, cloud computing has enabled us to automate it. Infrastructure as code enables us to build an automated delivery process for infrastructure which gets deployed in a matter of seconds as long as that infrastructure is expressed as code. AWS CloudFormation is one of the pioneer tools that allowed infrastructure to be expressed as code.

CloudFormation 101

CloudFormation, or CFN as it is also called, is a tool to automate the creation, updating, and management of the entire infrastructure stack on AWS in a centralized fashion. Many say it’s a cheesier version of TerraForm which can do more than just AWS cloud, but sometimes you just need to use that. If your infrastructure is already on AWS and you want to leverage Infrastructure as a Code (IaC), you should consider using AWS CloudFormation.

The idea behind CloudFormation is pretty simple: creating resources manually can be tedious, and while it can be automated with CLI or API queries, if you need to update the stack in the future, it will always be mostly a manual process. Instead of worrying about this, CloudFormation offers a way to model the structure and configuration of all your infrastructure and…