Now with CloudFormation, AWS (Amazon Web Services) has released a new feature for spinning up application resources and applications to multiple AWS accounts and those accounts can span multiple regions.
This capability can be configured through defining one CloudFormation stack with the necessary options defined in your yaml or json file.
So let’s back up if you’re already lost and are unsure if this is actually cool or not.
TLDR: This is a really cool new feature.
CloudFormation allows you to set and provision a collection of resources and services via a yaml or json file. CloudFormation also provides templates from the AWS Console if you don’t feel like doing it yourself. Here’s a look –
Step one: Sign into your AWS Account via the AWS Console (for this example). Then search for CloudFormation and click the orange ‘Create stack’ button –
Next you will be able to specify the location of your yaml or json file, or select a CloudFormation stack template –
If you selected a template or uploaded your own file, you could then begin configuring your application(s) or resource(s).
Here’s an example of a yaml template that provisions resources with CloudFormation –
You can also view your configuration with the Designer View that shows a visual illustration of the relationship of your services and resources configuration.
So back to CloudFormation StackSets. This new feature provides a lot more flexibility and extends your basic capabilities with Amazon CloudFormation. Now if you want to spin up resources for your environment in your Development account with resources provisioned in the US-East-1 Region, your best friend’s Production environment located in the AP-Northeast-3 Region, your boss’s sandbox environment located in US-West-2, you name it. Now you can do it. If you wanted to spin up a template to create a blog site like this in all of those accounts, which are located in three distinct locations, you can do it with CloudFormation StackSets. You could then use another CloudFormation StackSet to update or even delete those resources in those other accounts.
Another cool aspect of this feature is that it is Open Source technology. Developers can add features, squash bugs, you name it to this update. Here’s the GitHub link if you’d like to check it out!
Resources mentioned in this article:
