AWS CloudFormation announces new features

Posted on: Jul 11, 2011

We are excited to announce a set of new capabilities for AWS CloudFormation: Amazon Route53 weighted round robin (WRR) functionality, Elastic Load Balancing zone apex support and security group integration, Oracle for Amazon RDS instances and resource metadata support. In addition, we have created CloudFormer, a prototype tool that enables you to create templates from the existing AWS resources in your account.

AWS CloudFormation now supports the ability to configure security groups for your EC2 instances so they'll only accept traffic from an Elastic Load Balancer. By using Elastic Load Balancers in conjunction with Amazon Route 53, you can map your root domain, or "zone apex" directly to your load balancer. For more information, read the related AWS Blog post. In addition, AWS CloudFormation supports the Amazon Route 53 Weighted Round Robin (WRR) functionality, allowing developers to specify the frequency ("weights") with which different DNS responses are returned to end users. 

AWS CloudFormation now allows you to attach arbitrary, structured metadata to any resource in your template allowing you to "tag" your resources with additional information. By using this feature, you can store configuration data in the template and access it using the AWS CloudFormation command line tools or the APIs. 

Finally, with the CloudFormer prototype tool, you can provision and configure your application resources the way you want using your existing processes and tools. Once everything is setup and you have the resources provisioned, simply take a "snapshot" of the configuration to create a template, enabling you to launch copies of the application with just a few clicks through the AWS Management Console

We have added a number of additional example templates to illustrate these new features to get you started quickly.

The AWS CloudFormation team