What are the benefits of solutions with AWS CloudFormation?
AWS CloudFormation allows you to write code to model and provision AWS cloud services, in the same way code is written to create an application. AWS CloudFormation gives you control over your infrastructure, in exactly the same, simple, way that code does.
There is version control, so you can keep track of all changes made to your infrastructure and applications, and you can quickly and reliably create a replica of your infrastructure for development and testing. Deploying complex infrastructures becomes a one-click exercise.
AWS CloudFormation models your entire infrastructure and application resources with either a text file or programming languages and this provides a single source of truth for all your resources. This means you can standardise infrastructure components used across your organisation, enabling configuration compliance and faster troubleshooting.
AWS CloudFormation provisions your application resources in a safe, repeatable manner, allowing you to build and rebuild your infrastructure and applications, without having to perform manual actions or write custom scripts.
Codifying your infrastructure means you can author it with any code editor, check it into a version control system, and review the files with team members before deploying into production. The infrastructure can follow all the best practices an organisation has for traditional development, including automated testing and deployment via continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).
AWS CloudFormation, as a single source of truth for your Amazon Web Services and third party resources, is the core of automating cloud infrastructure. Examples of third party resources are monitoring, team productivity, incident management, and version control tools.
As an example, modular design of 'stacks' for networking allows an organisation to create blueprints to help enforce baseline security or compliance standards.
When your AWS architecture needs updating due to changes in business requirements, AWS CloudFormation allows you to reason about the updates in code, manages the dependency for any updates, additions or deletions, allows you to preview the changes, and can support automated rollback with support from Amazon CloudWatch. There are no manual steps or controls that can lead to errors. You can use Rollback Triggers to specify the CloudWatch alarm that AWS CloudFormation should monitor during the stack creation and update process. If any of the alarms are breached, AWS CloudFormation rolls back the entire stack operation to a previous deployed state.
Jonathan Custance, Director and Co-Founder of Green Custard, says: "As a Professional Services business, achieving AWS CloudFormation Service Delivery status demonstrates how important we take the need to deploy and manage solutions we have built, migrated or re-architected for our current and future customers. It is an essential part of any AWS infrastructure project."
Amazon says: "The AWS Service Delivery Program enables AWS customers to identify APN Consulting Partners with experience and a deep understanding of specific AWS services. These APN Partners follow best practices for AWS services and have proven success delivering AWS services to customers."
You can find out more about infrastructure and DevOps or book your free consultation via the at Green Custard website: www.green-custard.com