Learn AWS Automation And How to Use CloudFormation With Our New Course

I’m so glad to see a brand new course available in the Cloud Academy Training Library, and an extremely interesting one too How to Use CloudFormation for AWS Automation, made by our Senior DevOps Engineer Antonio Angelino, who worked hard to craft this new tutorial about one of the most interesting services in the AWS family.

Indeed, automatic resource provisioning is among the best features available in the Cloud, isn’t it? It’s just amazing how you can save the recipe for your whole infrastructure in a file, and then let it be cooked and prepared for you. Just think to how complex a modern IT infrastructures can be: computing instances, load balancers, storage volumes, CDNs, caching nodes, database, etc. In a traditional environment, you need to setup each component on its own, keep it updated, perform maintenance, and all the other typical daily routine around it. That’s where AWS CloudFormation steps in and can really help you to avoid all this burden, someway simplifying the whole thing. You write a template containing the description of your architecture, and then CloudFormation takes care of provisioning and setting it up. It’s not without some drawbacks, but still it is an amazing and useful service.

So, to get the best out of it, and to dodge the downsides that can affect your work, the new course Antonio just published is really your friend here. I like how it mixes some theory to get started and a detailed practical example to give you a taste of how powerful CloudFormation can be. In the first part of the course, you will get a nice outline of the service and a deep overview of the template’s syntax. The second half is all about installing WordPress in an highly available infrastructure, analyzing how you can do that, how the template for such an effort should be written, how the stack creation process works under the hood.

I think it’s an interesting course that can really bring you from zero to proficient with CloudFormation. Of course, some basic skills about AWS are necessary to get the most out of it. For example, you should already have some experience with the services the course uses to build the infrastructure, like Amazon EC2, RDS, Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Auto-Scaling. Also, some very basic knowledge about WordPress and the JSON file format can be helpful for some parts of the course. If you need to bolster your knowledge about AWS and its services, please take a look at our other AWS Learning Paths, where you will find tutorials that might be helpful to get you started. Also, don’t forget to check out our AWS Quizzes, that will both test your knowledge and teach as you answer thanks to our exclusive Learnings-based technology.

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