Using Tooling to Improve AWS CloudFormation Template Quality

Using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as AWS CloudFormation has many benefits, including making your infrastructure deployments reliable and easy to repeat.

Defining infrastructure with code also has some challenges, including making security audits and reviews more complex. To get the most out of working with AWS CloudFormation templates, tooling can aid the process.

In this hands-on lab, you will see how to use various tools to inspect, format, and audit AWS CloudFormation templates.

Learning Objectives

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

• Validate a template using the AWS command-line interface
• Use a command-line tool to format a template
• Use tooling to identify potential security issues with a template
• Use the AWS CFN Policy Validator to analyze policies embedded in a template

Intended Audience

• Candidates for AWS certification
• Cloud Architects
• Data Engineers
• DevOps Engineers
• Machine Learning Engineers
• Software Engineers
• Anyone who regularly works with AWS CloudFormation templates

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

• AWS CloudFormation
• The Git source-control system
• The Bash command line
• The YAML file format

The following content can be used to fulfill the prerequisite:

• AWS CloudFormation: Introduction to Infrastructure as Code
• Using Git for Version Control: Commits
• Linux Command Line Byte Session
• Reading, Writing, and Parsing YAML Files