News

AWS CloudFormation Infrastructure Tool Boosts Import Functionality, More

• By David Ramel
• 11/18/2019

Amazon Web Services has been busy updating its AWS CloudFormation service, used for describing and provisioning infrastructure resources for cloud environments.

Specifically, AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for those tasks, letting organizations model their cloud infrastructure with programming languages or a text file.

"Codifying your infrastructure allows you to treat your infrastructure as just code," AWS says. "You can author it with any code editor, check it into a version control system, and review the files with team members before deploying into production."

In two recent posts, AWS announced a new resource import feature, which lets enterprises bring existing application resources into CloudFormation, and also updates for working with other AWS services.

Of the former resource import feature, the company said, "AWS CloudFormation is announcing resource import which allows you to bring existing AWS application resources into CloudFormation. With this launch, you can start managing existing resources such as Amazon S3 Buckets or DynamoDB Tables with all the benefits of CloudFormation, regardless of how they were created or managed previously. You can now leverage automation at scale with these resources instead of relying on manual processes or maintaining custom scripts.

"With resource import, you can also refactor existing CloudFormation stacks and rename CloudFormation resources. For example, you can now modify what resources are grouped together during CloudFormation updates."

This can be done via the AWS CloudFormation Management console, the AWS SDKs and the AWS CLI.

More information is available in documentation titled "Bringing Existing Resources Into CloudFormation Management."

As far as the lattr announcement, working with other services, the company said, "You can now use CloudFormation templates to configure and provision additional features for AWS CodePipeline, Amazon API Gateway, AWS Amplify, Amazon ElasticSearch Service (Amazon ES), AWS App Mesh, and more AWS resources. CloudFormation periodically releases additional support, making it easier for developers to configure and provision AWS services."

Specifically, users gain the new abilities to:

• Specify tags for custom action and pipeline in AWS CodePipeline.
• Specify tags for API Key, Rest API, Usage Plan, Domain name, and Client Certificate in Amazon API Gateway.
• Specify whether the AWS Amplify console creates a preview for each pull request that is made for the branch and a dedicated backend environment for your pull request previews.
• Specify a list of tags to add to a new topic in Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS).
• Specify the LogPublishingOptions property to configure slow log publishing for Amazon ES.
• Specify properties to add a GRPC route, route action, route match, route metadata, route metadata match method, and route retry policy for AWS App Mesh.
• Add or update schema attributes, an alias for the user pool, and specify parameters to determine if email addresses or phone numbers can be used as user names when a user signs up in Amazon Cognito.
• Create a message template that you can use in messages that are sent through the email channel, push notification channel, or SMS channel in Amazon Pinpoint.

The above is possible in all AWS public and GovCloud regions, while the resource import feature is available in US East (Ohio), US EAST (N. Virginia), US West (N. California), US West (Oregon), Canada (Central), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Tokyo), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Paris) and South America (São Paulo).