🏗️ Day 23: Intro to CloudFormation – Automate Your AWS Setup
Category: AWS Automation / Infrastructure as Code
Goal: Understand what CloudFormation is and why it’s used
🧠 What You’ll Learn Today:
- What is AWS CloudFormation
- Why we use it
- Key components: Templates, Stacks
- How it simplifies infrastructure setup
- Real-world examples
💡 1. What Is CloudFormation?
CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service from AWS.
It allows you to define and manage your cloud infrastructure using code instead of clicking in the AWS Console.
💬 Think of it like writing instructions in a file (template), and AWS builds everything for you.
🧰 2. Why Use CloudFormation?
Without CloudFormation:
- You manually create services one by one
- It’s time-consuming and error-prone
With CloudFormation:
✅ You automate the process
✅ Ensure consistency across environments
✅ Version control your setup
✅ Easily recreate or update resources
📦 3. Key Concepts
📝 Template
- A text file (YAML or JSON)
- Describes all the AWS resources you want (like EC2, S3, etc.)
📦 Stack
- A group of AWS resources created from a template
- You manage all the resources in the stack together
🛠️ 4. How It Works – Simple Steps
- Write a Template
- Describe what you want to create: EC2, VPC, S3, etc.
- Upload Template to CloudFormation
- Can do this via AWS Console or CLI
- Launch a Stack
- AWS reads the template and creates all the resources automatically
- Manage the Stack
- Update, delete, or re-use the same template anytime
🔁 5. Real-Life Use Case
Let’s say you need:
- 1 VPC
- 2 EC2 instances
- 1 RDS Database
- 1 S3 bucket
You can write all of that into a CloudFormation template and spin it up with one click. Perfect for:
- Development
- Testing
- Production environments
🧠 End of the Day Notes:
🧾 CloudFormation turns your cloud setup into reusable code
⚙️ Great for automation, consistency, and time-saving
📂 Use YAML format for readability
🎯 It’s a must-know tool for DevOps & AWS engineers
🔁 Navigate the Series:
⬅️ Day 22: Static Website Hosting on S3-Host Websites the Easy Way
➡️ Day 24: Build a Serverless App – No Servers, No Stress
