Simply put, CloudFormation is just Infrastructure as Code. What does that mean? How can that improve my DevOps team? Does it help my business? What about my IT budget? CloudFormation can help with all of those things, saving you time and money in all of your cloud computing endeavors. Afonza’s well versed in CloudFormation template design and deployment, allowing for increased efficiency and time to market with complex web infrastructures in AWS, we’re here to help you with your digital business ventures.
Launching and provisioning hundreds of cloud computing services has never been easier, this revolutionary platform allows you to easily edit your infrastructure as code for more efficient hardware provisioning inside the AWS console. The formatting of templates allows DevOps teams to visualize the data flow and dependencies of an infrastructure’s architecture natively inside AWS. The additional drag and drop option helps with the visualization of your environment while creating your template. Templates can be edited within CloudFormation, allowing for easy editing of an infrastructure or stack as well.
There are inherent benefits when you can abstract your hardware provisioning to code. For one thing, you can continue to use the same engineering practices and discipline you use when developing your application. This includes implementing a continuous deployment pipeline for your CloudFormation scripts; use AWS services like Code Commit, Code Star, and Code Deploy to make your development process easier. You can then further automate the hardware provisioning process with automatic environment evaluation, improving your situational awareness. An increased awareness improves availability and efficiency while further improving the documentation process for your IT department, and allowing for frequent and small reversible changes in your complex infrastructure, refining your operations quickly and frequently.
CloudFormation templates make launching full production environments as simple as clicking a few buttons. You can setup deployment automation with a modeled and editable infrastructure template. Automated hardware provisioning can be difficult especially when making changes, when your entire environment has been reduced to code, it becomes easier to make small frequent changes that can be reverted. Applying the same engineering discipline to your hardware and software is a huge advantage when performing your infrastructure operations as code.
CloudFormation offers point in time recovery when deploying stacks, while also saving changes of your templates like regular code, similar to commits, branches, and checkouts. With your operations as code, you can continue to maintain situational awareness significantly easier. Your environment becomes much more visual and its easier to track and revert changes. Allow other AWS Services like CodeCommit, CodePipeline, CodeStar, and others to integrate into your development process, further automating your infrastructure’s improvements with a continuous deployment pipeline integration.
Not only does CloudFormation configure and launch AWS stacks from your code, it helps with the creation and editing of your templates as well. The development environment in CloudFormation is able to detect errors in the pre-launch phase of your templates. The declarative code is simple and used by thousands of developers, using native JSON and YAML formats. These scripts make it easy to replicate an entire complex multi-region application infrastructure in just seconds, making it easier for your team to spin up development and testing environments in a flash without any human intervention, limiting errors. You can tear down these infrastructures whenever you like as well in the same quick manner.
The scripting of an environment allows for infrastructure management at a massive scale. Your entire architecture can be configured to evaluate your hardware automatically. Changes can be seen incrementally and visual by the user while automation scripts continually check on the health of the environment.
The use of CloudFormation does not incur any extra AWS fees. Any costs billed to your account only stem from the use of any hardware provisioned, like EC2 instances or S3 buckets. Go ahead, start experimenting in CloudFormation today, a free development environment for your computing needs is something no business owner should pass up. Allow Afonza to guide you along the way using secure, scalable, managed architectures ready to be deployed within seconds with the help of AWS CloudFormation.
Want to learn more about CloudFormation and how it works? Check out this course on A Cloud Guru!
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