Posted On: Jun 21, 2021

AWS CloudFormation announces the launch of the CloudFormation Public Registry, a new searchable collection of extensions that allows you to discover, provision, and manage third-party extensions, which include resource types (provisioning logic) and modules published by AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners and the developer community. You can also create and publish your own extensions on the CloudFormation Public Registry, allowing anyone to use them. Today, you can centrally search and use over 35 extensions published on the Public Registry by APN Partners and AWS Quick Starts. You can view the identity verification for each extension publisher on the Public Registry. APN Partners who collaborated on this launch include MongoDB, Datadog, Atlassian Opsgenie, JFrog, Trend Micro, Splunk, Aqua Security, FireEye, Sysdig, Snyk, Check Point, Spot by NetApp, Gremlin, Stackery, and Iridium.

With this launch, anyone can now publish their resource types on the Public Registry. AWS CloudFormation and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) customers can discover the published third-party resource types, eliminating the need to build and maintain these resources type themselves. You no longer have to maintain a separate custom resource to provision or manage this capability. With third-party resource types included in the Public Registry, you can use CloudFormation features such as drift detection. Drift detection allows you to identify resource drift in your stack from its expected template configuration and understand detailed information about the drift status for each third-party resource type. You can also use AWS Config to manage the compliance of third-party resource types. Resource types from the CloudFormation Registry will be automatically tracked in AWS Config as Configuration Items, if you create, update, or delete these resources using CloudFormation and if you have configured AWS Config to record all resource types. Whether they are third-party or AWS resources, you can now view configuration history for Registry resource types as well as write Config rules to verify configuration best practices.

Public Registry also supports CloudFormation modules. Anyone can now publish a collection of reusable modules on the Public Registry. Customers can browse, discover, and choose from this collection of pre-built modules to provision the resources without needing to sort through detailed resource configurations.

Customers can also activate these third-party resource types or modules across their entire organization or specific organization units (OUs) in a single operation using CloudFormation StackSets with service-managed permissions. You can use the AWS::CloudFormation::TypeActivation resource type in a template submitted to StackSets that targets the entire AWS Organization or a particular OU, and pass the ARN for the third-party public extension to activate it.

CloudFormation Public Registry is generally available in the following AWS Regions: US East (N. Virginia, Ohio), US West (Oregon, N. California), Canada (Central), Europe (Ireland, Frankfurt, London, Stockholm, Paris, Milan), Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Mumbai, Osaka, Singapore, Sydney, Seoul, Tokyo), South America (Sao Paulo), Middle East (Bahrain), and Africa (Cape Town).

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with native AWS resource types. When you use AWS CloudFormation with third-party resource types, you will incur charges based on the number of handler operations you run per month and handler operation duration (refer to the pricing page) for more details). To learn more, refer to our user guide on CloudFormation Public Registry