Chapter 1
CloudFormation Refresher

Cloud computing introduced a brand-new way of managing the infrastructure.

As the demand for the AWS cloud grew, the usual routine and operational tasks became troublesome. The AWS cloud allowed any type of business to rapidly grow and solve all the business needs regarding compute power; however, the need to maintain a certain stack of resources was hard.

DevOps culture brought a set of methodologies and ways of working, and one of those is called infrastructure as code. This process is about treating your infrastructure—network, virtual machines, storages, databases, and so on—as a computer program.

AWS CloudFormation was developed to solve this kind of problem.

You will already have some working knowledge of CloudFormation, but before we dive deep into learning advanced template development and how to provision at scale, use CloudFormation with CI/CD pipelines, and extend its features, let's quickly refresh our memory and look again at what CloudFormation is and how we use it.

In this chapter, we will learn the following:

• The internals of AWS CloudFormation
• Creating and updating a CloudFormation stack
• Managing permissions for CloudFormation
• Detecting unmanaged changes in our stack