AWS CloudFormation Adds Support for AWS CodePipeline, AWS Config and more

Posted On: Dec 3, 2015

AWS CloudFormation has added support for four additional AWS services and several new features.

You can now provision the following AWS services using CloudFormation. Visit here for a full list of supported services.

  • AWS CodePipeline: You can now use CloudFormation to provision software release pipelines using CodePipeline, a continuous delivery service for fast and reliable application updates. Learn more here.
  • AWS Config: You can use CloudFormation to provision Config resources to help you monitor changes to your AWS resources. Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance.
    • You can now provision a function that assesses whether your AWS resources comply with your specified configurations. Learn more.
    • You can now record configuration changes for the AWS resource types that you specify and direct where Config stores these changes. Learn more here.
  • AWS Key Management Service: AWS KMS is a managed service that makes it easy for you to create and control the encryption keys used to protect your data. You can now use CloudFormation to encrypt data stored in AWS services with KMS. Learn more about provisioning KMS with CloudFormation here. As a result, you can also use CloudFormation to provision encrypted resources for the following:
  • Amazon EC2 Simple Systems Manager (SSM): You can now provision SSM documents for EC2 Windows instances with CloudFormation. EC2 SSM enables you to run scripts or other common administrative tasks on your EC2 Windows instances. Learn more here.

You can now use the following new features using CloudFormation:

  • Auto Scaling policies: You can now specify the policy type that dictates how an Auto Scaling group scales up or down in response to an Amazon CloudWatch alarm. You can also set the minimum threshold for signaling a successful update when an Auto Scaling group rolls out updates, whereas previously you could not change the threshold from the default setting of 100%.
  • AWS CloudTrail integration with Amazon CloudWatch: You can now let CloudTrail stream logs into CloudWatch Logs using CloudFormation. Previously, you could not model this integration using CloudFormation.
  • AWS CodeDeploy custom names: You can now create custom names for CodeDeploy components modeled with CloudFormation. You can specify a custom name for the CodeDeploy components for application revision, deployment configuration, and deployment group.
  • Amazon DynamoDB Streams: You can now use CloudFormation to provision DynamoDB Streams, which lets you capture a time ordered sequence of item level changes in DynamoDB tables. Learn more here.
  • Amazon EC2 Spot fleet features: You can now specify how to allocate target capacity across Spot fleets. You can also specify how instances are terminated if the target capacity is below the size of the Spot fleet. Learn more here.
  • Increased stack limits: You can now provision up to 200 stacks per account, up from the previous limit of 20 stacks.
  • Group parameters in the console: You can now group resource parameters together in a logical manner that you specify. This makes it easier for users of your templates to input parameters in the console. Previously, the console would display an unsorted list of parameters, making parameter input time-consuming and difficult. You can define how the parameters are sorted in the template’s JSON file, after which the console will update with your new groupings. Learn more here.

Please visit our website for more information on AWS CloudFormation: