AWS CloudFormation at AWS re:Invent 2015: Breakout Session Recap, Videos, and Slides

The AWS CloudFormation team and others presented and shared many updates and best practices during several 2015 AWS re:Invent sessions in October. We wanted to take the opportunity to show you where our presentation slides and videos are located as well as highlight a few product updates and best practices that we shared at this year’s re:Invent.

• DVO304 – AWS CloudFormation Best Practices: slides and video
• ARC307 – Infrastructure as Code: slides and video
• DVO303 – Scaling Infrastructure Operations with AWS: slides and video
• ARC401 – Cloud First: New Architecture for New Infrastructure: slides and video
• DVO310 – Benefit from DevOps When Moving to AWS for Windows: slides and video
• DVO401 – Deep Dive into Blue/Green Deployments on AWS: slides and video
• SEC312 – Reliable Design and Deployment of Security and Compliance: slides and video

AWS CloudFormation Designer

We introduced CloudFormation Designer in early October. During our re:Invent session DVO304 (AWS CloudFormation Best Practices), we introduced CloudFormation Designer and then did a live demo and walkthrough of its key features and use cases.

AWS CloudFormation Designer is a new visual tool that allows you to visually edit your CloudFormation templates as a diagram. It provides a drag-and-drop interface for adding resources to templates, and CloudFormation Designer automatically modifies the underlying JSON when you add or remove resources. You can also use the integrated text editor to view or specify template details, such as resource property values and input parameters.

To learn more about this feature:

• Watch the CloudFormation Designer portion of our re:Invent talk to see a demo
• View slides 3-13 to learn more about CloudFormation Designer from our re:Invent talk

Updated resource support in CloudFormation

In the same session, we also talked about the five new resources that CloudFormation can provision which we introduced in October. To stay up to-date on CloudFormation resource support updates, please visit here to see a list of all currently supported AWS resources.

Other topics covered in our “AWS CloudFormation Best Practices” breakout session

• Using Cost Explorer to budget and estimate a stack’s cost
• Collecting audit logs using the CloudTrail integration with CloudFormation
• CloudFormation advanced language features
• How to extend CloudFormation to resources that are not yet supported by CloudFormation
• Security and user-access best practices
• Best practices for writing CloudFormation templates when sharing templates with teams or users that have different environments or are using different AWS regions

Please reach us at the AWS CloudFormation forum if you have more feedback or questions.