AWS CloudFormation Template Design Considerations

Designing CloudFormation Templates for Resource Creation

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Question

A company has a Cloudformation template that is used to create a huge list of resources.

It creates a VPC, subnets, EC2 Instances, Autoscaling Groups, Load Balancers etc.

Which of the following should be considered when designing such Cloudformation templates?

Answers

Explanations

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A. B. C. D.

Answer - B.

This recommendation is also given in the AWS Documentation.

As your infrastructure grows, common patterns can emerge in which you declare the same components in each of your templates.

You can separate out these common components and create dedicated templates for them.

That way, you can mix and match different templates but use nested stacks to create a single, unified stack.

Nested stacks are stacks that create other stacks.

To create nested stacks, use the AWS::CloudFormation::Stack resource in your template to reference other templates.

Option A is incorrect since this is not the recommended design practice.

Options C and D are incorrect because these are used for packaging and deployment and not for the design stages.

For more information on best practices for Cloudformation, please refer to the below URL-

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/best-practices.html

When designing a CloudFormation template that creates a large number of resources, there are a few things to consider:

A. Ensure to create one entire stack from the template:

While it is possible to create one large CloudFormation stack with all of the resources defined in a single template, this approach can make the stack difficult to manage, troubleshoot, and update. In addition, a large stack can make it harder to understand the overall architecture of the infrastructure. For example, if the stack creation fails, it can be difficult to determine which resource caused the failure. Therefore, this option is not the best approach.

B. Look towards breaking the templates into smaller manageable templates:

One approach to managing a large number of resources is to break the CloudFormation template into smaller, more manageable templates. This approach can help with troubleshooting, understanding the overall architecture of the infrastructure, and updating the resources more efficiently. By breaking the templates into smaller templates, you can also reuse common resources across multiple stacks, which can save time and reduce complexity.

C. Package the templates together and use the cloudformation deploy command:

The cloudformation deploy command packages the CloudFormation templates and any referenced artifacts into an Amazon S3 bucket, creates a new CloudFormation stack, and updates the stack if it already exists. This approach can be useful for deploying multiple CloudFormation stacks at once, such as when you have multiple environments (e.g., dev, staging, prod) that require the same resources. However, this option is not directly related to designing the CloudFormation templates themselves.

D. Package the templates together and use the cloudformation package command:

The cloudformation package command packages the CloudFormation templates and any referenced artifacts into an Amazon S3 bucket. This command is useful when the templates are too large to be deployed directly to CloudFormation, or when the templates reference local files (e.g., shell scripts). This option is also not directly related to designing the CloudFormation templates themselves.

In conclusion, the best option for designing a CloudFormation template that creates a large number of resources is to break the template into smaller, more manageable templates.