Tag: Best practices

Under the Hood: AWS CodeDeploy and Auto Scaling Integration AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates application deployments to your fleet of servers. Auto Scaling is a service that lets you dynamically scale your fleet based on load. Although these services are standalone, you can use them together for hands-free deployments! Whenever new Amazon EC2 […]

Many organizations use AWS CloudFormation (CloudFormation) stacks to facilitate blue/green deployments, routinely launching replacement AWS resources with updated packages for code releases, security patching, and change management. To facilitate blue/green deployments with CloudFormation, you typically pass code version identifiers (e.g., a commit hash) to new application stacks as template parameters. Application servers in an Auto Scaling […]

My colleague Nick Humrich wrote up the guest post below to share a powerful way to use the EB CLI to manage environment configurations — Abhishek The AWS Elastic Beanstalk command line interface (EB CLI) makes it easier for developers to get started with Elastic Beanstalk by using command line tools. Last November, we released […]

AWS CodeDeploy is a new service that makes it easy to deploy application updates to Amazon EC2 instances. CodeDeploy is targeted at customers who manage their EC2 instances directly, instead of those who use an application management service like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or AWS OpsWorks that have their own built-in deployment features. CodeDeploy allows developers […]

When you provision an Amazon EC2 instance in an AWS CloudFormation stack, you might specify additional actions to configure the instance, such as install software packages or bootstrap applications. Normally, CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation after the instance has been successfully created. However, you can use a CreationPolicy so that CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation […]

With AWS CloudFormation, you can provision the full breadth of AWS resources including Amazon EC2 instances. You provision the EC2 instances to run applications that drive your business. Here are some best practices for deploying and updating those applications on EC2 instances provisioned inside CloudFormation stacks: Use AWS::CloudFormation::Init Use IAM roles to securely download software […]

When you create AWS CloudFormation templates, you might find that you’re continually describing the same set of resources in different templates. However, instead of repeatedly adding them to each of your templates, consider using nested stacks. What are Nested Stacks With nested stacks, you can link to a template from within any other template. You […]

When you delete a stack, by default AWS CloudFormation deletes all stack resources so that you aren’t left with any strays. This also means any data that you have stored in your stack are also deleted (unless you take manual snapshots).  For example, data stored in Amazon EC2 volumes or Amazon RDS database instances are […]

Invalid input for parameter values is the number one reason for stack creation failures. To make it easier to enter the correct parameter values and to improve parameter validation, the AWS CloudFormation team recently added the ability to set additional data types for parameters. Parameter types enable CloudFormation to validate inputs earlier in the stack […]

AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning on AWS. You can apply software engineering best practices such as version control, code reviews, unit tests, and continuous integration to the AWS CloudFormation templates, the same way you apply those best practices to your application code. For example, with application code, you can add descriptive comments to help you document various portions […]