The Key to Efficient Cloud Infrastructure with AWS CloudFormation
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In this article, I will share some important factors about cloud automation and later discuss why AWS CloudFormation is often referred to as the “superman” of AWS.
“The most powerful tool we have as developers is automation.” — Scott Hanselman
As developers, we understand the power of automation. It is a tool that can save time and costs, and that’s where AWS CloudFormation comes in. In technical terms, CloudFormation is referred to as “infrastructure as code.”
Before we delve into the details, it’s important to have a basic understanding of cloud infrastructure and AWS offerings. This article is not a step-by-step guide for setting up AWS cloud services or a code tutorial. Rather, it aims to highlight the power of the cloud through automation, with a few examples.
Moving to cloud infrastructure has become a necessity in today’s world. Enterprises and product companies are increasingly migrating to the cloud, whether it be Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure. Such a migration offers numerous advantages:
- Easy to use
- Flexible
- Reliable
- Scalable and high performance
- Cost-effective
However, it’s important to note that even if you have migrated to the cloud if it’s not automated, there is still a long way to go.
Let’s consider a scenario where an Agile product development team has completed the development phase and is ready for User Acceptance Testing (UAT). A DevOps engineer is tasked with setting up a UAT environment on the cloud for clients. Let’s see how this process unfolds.
Setting up an EC2 instance with specific memory and computation power on AWS.
Configuring VPC and network access, as well as other controls.
Setting up the deployment environment and installing the required runtime (e.g. Node.js, Java) to run the application on the EC2 instance.
And much more, including setting up Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and CloudWatch for log…
