Now extend AWS CloudFormation to model, provision, and manage third party resources

Posted on: Nov 18, 2019

Today, AWS CloudFormation is introducing a set of capabilities that make it easy to model and automate the management of third party resources such as SaaS monitoring or incident management tools with the benefits of infrastructure-as-code. With this launch, you can use AWS CloudFormation as a single tool to automate provisioning of your infrastructure and application resources, whether AWS or third party, without the need for custom scripts or manual processes. You can now create your own private AWS CloudFormation resource providers, share them with the open source community, and leverage third party providers developed by others.  

With the AWS CloudFormation Registry, you can submit, discover, and manage resource providers. Once a resource provider is published in the AWS CloudFormation Registry, it can be used to manage third party resources in the same way as native AWS resource providers. This new functionality will also work out of the box with services such as AWS Control Tower and AWS Service Catalog to help you with governance and resource compliance, and AWS CloudFormation StackSets for cross-account and cross-region management. 

You can develop your own resource providers using the AWS CloudFormation CLI, a new open source developer tool, and publish them to the Registry. The new CLI includes code generation and local testing capabilities to streamline your development process. To help you get started, you can also use the open sourced AWS Simple Email Service and CloudWatch Logs examples.  

Finally, several AWS APN Partners (Atlassian, Datadog, Densify, Dynatrace, Fortinet, New Relic, Spotinst) are planning to offer an initial set of third party resource providers, with resource provider definitions, logic, and documentation accessible in their respective GitHub repositories. To use these or any other third party resource providers, just register them in a few simple steps. 

To start building your own resource providers just install the CloudFormation CLI and refer to our documentation. To start using existing third party resource providers today, follow these instructions. There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with native AWS resource providers. When you use AWS CloudFormation with third party resource providers, you will incur charges based on the number of handler operations you run per month (see the pricing page for more details). This capability is available in all AWS regions.