Tag: AWS CloudFormation

Some of the customers I work with provide AWS Service Catalog products to their end-users to enable self-service for launching and managing Amazon Redshift, EMR clusters or web applications at scale using AWS Auto Scaling groups. These end-users would like the ability to self-manage these resources, for example, be able to take a snapshot of […]

Introduction Many AWS customers either integrate ServiceNow into their existing AWS services or set up both ServiceNow and AWS services for simultaneous use. One challenge in this use case is the need to update your configuration management database (CMDB) when a new spin-up instance appears in AWS. This post demonstrates how to integrate AWS Config […]

Enterprises deploy AWS resources and services daily to support different business objectives. For example: A data scientist might like to create an EMR cluster for a job that should not take longer than one week. A sales engineer needs a demo environment for two days. A marketing application owner wants a marketing application to run […]

In Q4 2018, the AWS CloudFormation team released a refreshed version of the management console as an opt-in experience. This redesign re-explored many of the common ways that you can interact with this service. In this post, I’d like to introduce a suite of updates that makes the redesign into the default console experience. The […]

Enterprises have many business requirements for tracking how software product licenses are used in their organization for financial, governance, and compliance reasons. By tracking license usage, organizations can stay within budget, track expenditures, and avoid unplanned true-up bills from their vendors’ true-up processes. The goal is to track the usage licenses as resources are deployed. […]

Now that large organizations have the flexibility to quickly launch infrastructure and leverage new services, they must find the means to maintain consistent controls without restricting development velocity. In this guest post, Brian Olson, Cloud Architect at health care company DocuTAP, discusses how a combination of AWS Management and Governance services and AWS developer tools […]

We’re living in a golden age of AWS CloudFormation tooling. Tools like cfn_nag and taskcat make it easier to treat your infrastructure as code by performing testing and validation before you deploy a single resource into your accounts. In this blog post, I’ll show you how to use linters to validate your CloudFormation templates.

I want to take you on a quick look back at what we added for AWS CloudFormation in 2018. We added coverage for 18 new AWS services (up from 14 in 2017) and many new features for existing services, several available at launch. Highlights of the features and new content that CloudFormation introduced in 2018, […]

As an organization expands its use of AWS services, there is often a conversation about the need to create multiple AWS accounts to ensure separation of business processes or for security, compliance, and billing. Many of the customers we work with use separate AWS accounts for each business unit so they can meet the different […]

Most AWS CloudFormation templates use parameters to enable customization. It’s important to validate parameters to ensure a good user experience. AWS CloudFormation gives you several ways to perform parameter validation. For example, you can specify AllowedValues or a Default, or you can assign Types. For more information on validating parameters, see the documentation. Often, developers […]