Chapter 2
Advanced Template Development

Bearing in mind the basics of CloudFormation, let's now move on to advanced development techniques.

In this chapter, we will learn more about the core parts of the CloudFormation templates, and we will do so by building a three-tier application consisting of a web tier (our customer-facing frontend), a middleware tier (processing commands coming from the frontend), and a storage tier (the database where we will store the records).

Don't worry! We're not going to write any software yet (only templates for CloudFormation). For now, we will focus on provisioning our infrastructure.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Going through the internals of the template
• Creating reusable templates
• Using conditional elements
• Deletion policies
• Referring to existing stacks
• AWS pseudo parameters
• Dynamic references with Parameter Store and Secrets Manager