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:

• Serializing and Transmitting Data in Javascript Object Notation
• AWS CloudFormation: Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
• Using Elastic Load Balancing & EC2 Auto Scaling to Support AWS Workloads
• AWS Virtual Private Cloud: Subnets and Routing

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.