hands-on lab

Hands-On CloudFormation for Deploy Scalability

Difficulty: Intermediate

Duration: Up to 2 hours

Students: 3,165

Rating: 4.5/5

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Description

AWS CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code tool from Amazon Web Services that enables automating the deployment of infrastructure and applications. Benefits of automating infrastructure deployments include:

Parity and consistency between development, test, and production environments
Rapid and repeatable deployments
Improved audibility

In this hands-on lab, you will translate business requirements into an AWS CloudFormation template and use it to deploy a fully-functional application with the following infrastructure components:

A VPC and public and private subnets
A NAT instance for access to the internet from a private subnet
Route tables and Network ACLs for the VPC
An Elastic Load Balancer (ELB) and Auto Scaling Group
Code deployment automation
Security Groups for the EC2 Instances and ELB
DynamoDB Table to persist data, and IAM Roles to allow EC2 Instance access

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this intermediate-level lab, you will be able to:

Author an AWS CloudFormation template
Use your template to create an AWS CloudFormation stack
Understand how to deploy into multiple AWS Regions

Intended Audience

DevOps Engineers
Solution Architects
SysOps Administrators
Cloud Engineers

Prerequisites

You will need a text editor available to author an AWS CloudFormation JSON template. Visual Studio Code is a free text editor you can use.

Knowledge and experience with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
AWS CloudFormation
Elastic Load Balancing and EC2 Auto Scaling
Using Subnets and Routes in Amazon Virtual Private Cloud

The following courses can be used to fulfill the requirements:

Updates

February 8th, 2022 - Modernised the template and addressed a minor discrepancy

February 12th, 2021 - Updated the lab to resolve a permission issue

October 22nd, 2020 - Updated all instructions and screenshots

May 29th, 2020 - Fixed an issue related to npm and dependencies

December 2nd, 2019 - Add availability zone constraint to avoid deploying in us-west-2d which fails because of an unsupported instance type is that zone

January 10th, 2019 - Added a validation Lab Step to check the work you perform in the Lab

September 18th, 2018 - Fixed an issue related to node's package manager (npm) failing to install some dependencies and causing the load balancer's URL to not display the app.