AWS DevOps & Developer Productivity Blog

Tag: CloudFormation

From ELK Stack to EKK: Aggregating and Analyzing Apache Logs with Amazon Elasticsearch Service, Amazon Kinesis, and Kibana

September 8, 2021: Amazon Elasticsearch Service has been renamed to Amazon OpenSearch Service. See details. By Pubali Sen, Shankar Ramachandran Log aggregation is critical to your operational infrastructure. A reliable, secure, and scalable log aggregation solution makes all the difference during a crunch-time debugging session. In this post, we explore an alternative to the popular log aggregation solution, the […]

Building a Microsoft BackOffice Server Solution on AWS with AWS CloudFormation

Last month, AWS released the AWS Enterprise Accelerator: Microsoft Servers on the AWS Cloud along with a deployment guide and CloudFormation template. This blog post will explain how to deploy complex Windows workloads and how AWS CloudFormation solves the problems related to server dependencies. This AWS Enterprise Accelerator solution deploys the four most requested Microsoft […]

Continue Rolling Back an Update for AWS CloudFormation stacks in the UPDATE_ROLLBACK_FAILED state

AWS CloudFormation allows developers and systems administrators to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources (called a stack) by provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable way. In this blog post, we will describe a new feature in AWS CloudFormation that will allow continue rolling back an update in a self-service […]

Optimize AWS CloudFormation Templates

The following post is by guest blogger Julien Lépine, Solutions Architect at AWS. He explains how to optimize templates so that AWS CloudFormation quickly deploys your environments. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Customers sometimes ask me if there’s a way to optimize large AWS CloudFormation templates, which can take several minutes to deploy a stack. Often stack creation is […]

Speed Template Sharing with an AWS CloudFormation Designer URL

AWS CloudFormation Designer (Designer) is a graphic tool for creating, viewing, and modifying AWS CloudFormation templates. With Designer, you can construct templates by adding resources using a drag-and-drop interface, and then edit resource details by using the integrated JSON editor. A Designer URL is a web link that you can share with anyone that has […]

Construct Your Own Launch Stack URL

When you use AWS CloudFormation templates to deliver your solutions, your users can get up and running with just a few clicks or commands. Users can launch an AWS CloudFormation stack with one of your templates, and AWS CloudFormation automatically provisions the specified resources and bootstraps the software running on them. Although users have several […]

Faster Auto Scaling in AWS CloudFormation Stacks with Lambda-backed Custom Resources

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 […]

Use a CreationPolicy to Wait for On-Instance Configurations

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 […]

Best Practices for Deploying Applications on AWS CloudFormation Stacks

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 […]