State Machines

As AWS-based cloud environments grow in complexity, DevOps Professionals need to adopt more powerful tools and techniques to manage complex deployments. In the AWS ecosystem, CloudFormation is the most powerful and sophisticated automation tool available to developers. In this lesson, we explore some of the most advanced CloudFormation skills AWS engineers can learn.

In addition to normal templated resource generation for single stacks using CloudFormation, engineers will learn how to:

• Develop continuous integration and continuous deployment on CloudFormation
• Tie into CloudFormation system events via SNS for operational tasks
• Nest multiple levels of CloudFormation stacks to build out massive cloud systems
• Author CloudFormation Custom Resources to add additional functionality and resource types to stacks

This lesson is best taken after reviewing the basics of CloudFormation with CloudAcademy's starter lesson How To Use AWS CloudFormation.

Demonstration Assets

The AWS CloudFormation templates and related scripts as demonstrated within this lesson can be found here:

https://github.com/cloudacademy/advanced-use-of-cloudformation