AWS CloudFormation Update – Public Coverage Roadmap & CDK Goodies

I launched AWS CloudFormation in early 2011 with a pair of posts: AWS CloudFormation – Create Your AWS Stack From a Recipe and AWS CloudFormation in the AWS Management Console. Since that launch, we have added support for many AWS resource types, launched many new features, and worked behind the scenes to ensure that CloudFormation is efficient, scalable, and highly available.

Public Coverage Roadmap
CloudFormation use is growing even faster than AWS itself, and the team has prioritized scalability over complete resource coverage. While our goal of providing 100% coverage remains, the reality is that it will take us some time to get there. In order to be more transparent about our priorities and to give you an opportunity to manage them, I am pleased to announce the much-anticipated CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap:

Styled after the popular AWS Containers Roadmap, the CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap contains four columns:

Shipped – Available for use in production form in all public AWS regions.

Coming Soon – Generally a few months out.

We’re working on It – Work in progress, but further out.

Researching – We’re thinking about the right way to implement the coverage.

Please feel free to create your own issues, and to give a thumbs-up to those that you need to have in order to make better use of CloudFormation:

Before I close out, I would like to address one common comment – that AWS is part of a big company, and that we should simply throw more resources at it. While the team is growing, implementing robust, secure coverage is still resource-intensive. Please consider the following quote, courtesy of the must-read Mythical Man-Month:

Good cooking takes time. If you are made to wait, it is to serve you better, and to please you.

Cloud Development Kit Goodies
The Cloud Development Kit (CDK) lets you model and provision your AWS resources using a programming language that you are already familiar with. You use a set of CDK Constructs (VPCs, subnets, and so forth) to define your application, and then use the CDK CLI to synthesize a CloudFormation template, deploy it to AWS, and create a stack.

Here are some resources to help you to get started with the CDK:

• CDK Home Page – Start here!
• AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) – TypeScript and Python are Now Generally Available – Danilo’s recent blog post announcing general availability.
• CDK Developer Guide – Learn how to use the CDK.
• CDK Workshop – A detailed workshop with step-by-step directions, in both TypeScript and Python.
• CDK All The Things: A Whirlwind Tour – Cloud consultant Kevin Lin of Thence Consulting wrote this very detailed review of CDK.
• CDK Custom Resource Example – Learn how to add a custom resource to a CDK app.

Stay Tuned
The CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap is an important waypoint on a journey toward open source that started out with cfn-lint, with some more stops in the works. Stay tuned and I’ll tell you more just as soon as I can!

— Jeff;