AWS CloudFormation

  1. Infrastructure as Code: Use CloudFormation when you want to define and manage your infrastructure in code, ensuring reproducibility and version control.
  2. Consistency: Ideal when you need consistent environments (e.g., dev, staging, production) across multiple AWS accounts or regions.
  3. Automation: Use when automating infrastructure provisioning and deployment, ensuring best practices are incorporated without manual intervention.
  4. Complex Architectures: Best suited for deploying and managing complex architectures with multiple AWS resources, ensuring dependencies are handled correctly.
  5. Scaling Infrastructure: Use when scaling environments up or down, enabling the rapid and automated creation or modification of infrastructure components.
  6. Security and Compliance: Use CloudFormation templates to enforce security settings and compliance standards across your resources (e.g., RDS databases).

1. Why to Use CloudFormation

  1. Reusable Templates: CloudFormation allows you to define reusable templates for infrastructure management, ensuring best practices are consistently applied.
  2. Version Control: Templates can be versioned and stored in version control systems like Git, enabling easy rollback and auditing.
  3. Declarative Configuration: The template defines the desired end state, and CloudFormation takes care of the provisioning and maintenance process.
  4. Enforces Best Practices: Ensure best practices for AWS resources, like RDS, are automatically incorporated when using CloudFormation templates.

2. Question

You started a new job as a solutions architect at a company that has both AWS experts and people learning AWS. Recently, a developer misconfigured a newly created Amazon RDS database which resulted in a production outage.

How can you ensure that Amazon RDS specific best practices are incorporated into a reusable infrastructure template to be used by all your AWS users?

  1. Store your recommendations in a custom AWS Trusted Advisor rule
  2. Attach an IAM policy to interns preventing them from creating an Amazon RDS database
  3. Use AWS CloudFormation to manage Amazon RDS databases (Correct Ans)
  4. Create an AWS Lambda function which sends emails when it finds misconfigured Amazon RDS databases