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what is cloud formation used for

by Ms. Ellen Cruickshank DVM Published 3 years ago Updated 2 years ago
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CloudFormation is designed to help you manage your AWS resources, especially associated resources. You can use CloudFormation to group resources with dependencies into stacks using templates. CloudFormation works by defining your AWS resources in a structured text file in either JSON or YAML formats. This is known as a CloudFormation template.

AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and businesses an easy way to create a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, and provision and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

Full Answer

What is the importance of cloud formation?

Cloud Formation has been a major topic of study for numerous branches of science, proving that they are much more than just simple structures that decide the type of rainfall a place can have. Definition: Clouds are formed when water droplets and ice crystals combine to form a floating mass in the sky.

What is CloudFormation and how does it work?

CloudFormation is designed to help you manage your AWS resources, especially associated resources. You can use CloudFormation to group resources with dependencies into stacks using templates. CloudFormation works by defining your AWS resources in a structured text file in either JSON or YAML formats. This is known as a CloudFormation template.

How are clouds formed?

Clouds are formed when warm, moist air rises up, cools down, and condenses into water droplets. There are ten major cloud shapes that fall into four groups based on altitude, or height in the sky.

What is a cloud in meteorology?

In meteorology, a cloud is an aerosol consisting of a visible mass of minute liquid droplets, frozen crystals, or other particles suspended in the atmosphere of a planetary body or similar space. Water or various other chemicals may compose the droplets and crystals.

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What are the benefits of CloudFormation?

Benefits of CloudFormationDeployment speed. ... Scaling up. ... Service integration. ... Consistency. ... Security. ... Easy updates. ... Auditing and change management. ... Template.More items...•

What is CloudFormation and how does it work?

CloudFormation creates a bucket for each region in which you upload a template file. The buckets are accessible to anyone with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) permissions in your AWS account. If a bucket created by CloudFormation is already present, the template is added to that bucket.

What Devops practice is AWS CloudFormation used for?

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion. You can use AWS CloudFormation's sample templates or create your own templates.

What is CloudFormation in Devops?

AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables developers to create AWS resources in an orderly and predictable fashion. Resources are written in text files using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) or Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) format.

What are the main components of CloudFormation?

A CloudFormation template consists of 6 sections – Description, Parameters, Mappings, Conditions, Resources and Outputs.

Is cloud formation same as Terraform?

Both CloudFormation and Terraform are flexible and compelling tools and offer comprehensive state management and automated logging. But they also provide different features that suit your infrastructure needs differently. If you're mainly working with AWS resources, CloudFormation might work best for you.

Which cloud is best for DevOps?

No doubt AWS and Azure are the two top players in the cloud technology space because both are very good at what they provide for DevOps in different ways. Azure is rapidly gaining market share, but AWS is still by far the largest cloud computing service provider in the world today.

What is cloud DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

What is the main purpose of AWS?

AWS is designed to allow application providers, ISVs, and vendors to quickly and securely host your applications – whether an existing application or a new SaaS-based application. You can use the AWS Management Console or well-documented web services APIs to access AWS's application hosting platform.

What language does cloud formation use?

An AWS CloudFormation template is a formatted text file in JSON or YAML language that describes your AWS infrastructure.

What is Terraform and cloud formation?

Terraform and CloudFormation are referred to as software that defines infrastructure, which helps your IT team to provision and manages your infrastructure with different tools. Infrastructure automation is one of the pillars of implementing DevOps practices in your project.

Why Terraform is better than cloud formation?

A benefit of Terraform is increased flexibility over CloudFormation with regards to modularity. Terraform modules can be pulled in for any provider supported, or organizations can roll their own.

The major benefits of CloudFormation include

With CloudFormation you can integrate with DevOps and GitOps best practices like establishing a Git repository and deploying infrastructure through a CI/CD pipeline. This allows you to audit changes and trigger deployments using pipeline integration tools like AWS CodePipeline and GitHub Actions.

How much does CloudFormation cost?

CloudFormation is essentially free to use. You only pay for the API calls CloudFormation makes on your behalf and the resources you provision, which is no different than manually creating them.

What Resources can you provision with CloudFormation?

Basically any AWS resources you can create from the AWS console can be provisioned within a CloudFormation template. This includes things like

What language are CloudFormation templates written in?

Templates are constructed of structured text. The declarations in your CloudFormation stack templates are written in JSON or YAML formats.

What is a CloudFormation Stack?

A stack is a collection of AWS resources provisioned by a template that you can manage as a single unit.

What is a CloudFormation StackSet?

A StackSet is a named set of stacks that use the same template that is used to provision resources across different accounts and regions. This enables a single operation to create, update or delete stacks across multiple regions and accounts.

How to Create CloudFormation Stacks from the AWS Console

To create a CloudFormation stack from the AWS console follow the steps below. In this example we’ll use a sample YAML template provided by AWS.

What are the clouds that cover the sky called?

Altocumulus clouds have that word 'cumulus,' so these are puffy clouds, but they tend to form in large bands across the sky. Low clouds come in three forms, and all have the word 'stratus' in their name because they cover the sky like a gray sheet. Stratus are what you might see on a hazy winter day.

What type of clouds make you want to stay inside all day?

Nimbostratus clouds are the ones that make you want to just stay inside all day. They are dark and wet looking, and often produce a decent amount of rain. Finally, we have vertical clouds, which are clouds that form vertically instead of horizontally. There are two types of vertical clouds, cumulus and cumulonimbus.

What is the name of the dark cloud at low altitude?

Altocumulus are like the cirrocumulus in that they are puffy (note that same suffix 'cumulus'), but these are very dark in color and tend to form puffy masses in parallel bands across the sky. Low clouds are clouds at low altitude, usually below 2,000 meters. There are three types of low clouds, all called 'stratus.'.

What are the clouds called that look like a horse tail?

Cirrus clouds are thin and wispy, sometimes called 'horse tail' clouds. Cirrocumulus clouds are the big, puffy clouds that look like a big head of curly hair. Cirrostratus clouds are like big sheets of thin clouds covering the sky, and this makes sense because the word 'stratus' means 'sheet-like.'.

What does a cirrostratus cloud look like?

Cirrocumulus clouds look like a curly head of hair floating about, and cirrostratus clouds are thin and sheet-like because this is what 'stratus' means. There are two types of middle clouds, Altostratus clouds are mid-level, sheet-like clouds that are bluish gray and cover the entire sky.

Why are cirrus clouds called horse tail clouds?

Cirrus clouds are also called 'horse tail' clouds because they are like thin wisps of hair high in the sky.

What are clouds made of?

Though they look different, all clouds are condensed water droplets in the air. They form when warm, moist air rises upward. As the warm air rises, it cools.

What is AWS CloudFormation?

Managing your infrastructure with many services can be hard. Creating and managing multiple AWS resources can be challenging and time-consuming. In fact, doing those things could result in spending a whole lot of time managing your AWS resources instead of developing your applications. How can we solve this problem?

AWS CloudFormation Concepts

An AWS CloudFormation template is a formatted text file in JSON or YAML language that describes your AWS infrastructure. To create, view and modify templates, you can use AWS CloudFormation Designer or any text editor tool. An AWS CloudFormation template consists of nine main objects:

AWS CloudFormation - Template Resource Attributes

Attributes allow you add to a resource, to control additional behavior and relationships between your templates.

Stacks in AWS CloudFormation

A collection of AWS resources is called a stack, and it can be managed in a single unit. CloudFormation’s template defines a stack in which the resources can be created, deleted or updated in a predictable way. A stack can have all the resources (web server, database, etc.) required to run a web application.

CloudFormation Access Control

With IAM, CloudFormation can give users access control and ensure that only IAM users can create, update and delete stacks. On the user’s behalf, a service role allows AWS CloudFormation to make calls to resources in a stack. It is applied to all AWS CloudFormation users who attempt to update the stack.

Demonstration and Use Case: Lamp Stack on an Ec2 Instance

The final sections of the video demonstrate how to put AWS CloudFormation to work through two examples:

Conclusion

Now that you know everything about AWS CloudFormation, you can go ahead and explore your career options working as an AWS Solutions Architect. AWS CloudFormation is one of the commonly asked topics in the AWS interview questions.

What is the process of cloud formation?

The mechanics of cloud formation includes evaporation of water droplets from the surface and condensation into clouds at a higher elevation. Moreover, the procedure occurs in the presence of very low pressure and low-temperature zone surrounding the vaporized water.

What are clouds made of?

Clouds compose of very tiny water droplets and ice particles. These are lightweight enough to float in the atmosphere. Clouds can form as a result of various kinds of atmospheric phenomena.

Why do clouds turn yellow?

Answer 1: The yellowish discolouration of clouds occur due to the presence of pollutants floating on the earth’s surface. The majority of these pollutants include nitrogen dioxide remnants of forest fires and dump yard burning.

Why are clouds important?

Clouds are integral decision-makers in the climatic changes of the environment. In addition to that, clouds are also important in maintaining and balancing the earth’s radiation. Depending on the cloud intensity and other climatic changes caused by them, the short and long wavelength radiation fluctuates. Cloud Formation has been a major topic of study for numerous branches of science, proving that they are much more than just simple structures that decide the type of rainfall a place can have.

Updating a stack with change sets

When you need to update your stack's resources, you can modify the stack's template. You don't need to create a new stack and delete the old one. To update a stack, create a change set by submitting a modified version of the original stack template, different input parameter values, or both.

Deleting a stack

When you delete a stack, you specify the stack to delete, and CloudFormation deletes the stack and all the resources in that stack. You can delete stacks by using the CloudFormation console, API, or AWS CLI .

Additional resources

For more information about creating CloudFormation templates, see Template anatomy .

Introduction to Clouds Formation

If we have to talk about two of the most important things for survival then it has to be air and water. Air is present all around us and with the help of plants oxygen keeps on renewing on its own. But have you ever thought that we use water in a very huge amount regularly and it never ends? Because it is also sell renewing.

What are Clouds?

In command language, it can be said that clouds are the white fluffy thing found and seen in the sky and leads to rain. But if we talk in a proper language then clouds are much more than this.

Different Types of Clouds

Take some time, go to your terrace and try to observe the sky and clouds in it. You will be able to see a lot of different patterns of clouds in the sky. There are many different types of clouds and they are differentiated based on their size, pattern, and the level on which they are found.

Middle Level Clouds

Then comes a little lower level and other types of clouds are found in this layer. These clouds are neither in the lowermost layer of the sky nor in the uppermost layer. The middle clouds form at elevations ranging from about 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) to 20,000 feet (6,000 meters).

Low Level Clouds

Then comes the bottom-most level of the sky, these clouds form at elevations below 6,500 feet (2,000 meters) and consist mostly of water, except during the winter when snow becomes a possibility. Clouds that are present at this level are largely possible for the rain. The clouds of this layer usually appear very huge and bulky in size.

Clouds With Vertical Development

Till now we have talked about clouds that grow at their level only but some clouds grow from one layer to another. This happens when a cloud rather than growing horizontally start growing vertically. And then they reach from one level to another.

Complete Cycle of Clouds Formation

Clouds don’t need the support of any living organism for their creation as it is a natural and very essential cycle. But there are a lot of steps that go into their formation. You will be surprised to know how systematic nature is and one step leads to another. So all the steps of the formation of clouds are mentioned below:

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Simplify Infrastructure Management

  • For a scalable web application that also includes a back-end database, you might use an Auto Scaling group, an Elastic Load Balancing load balancer, and an Amazon Relational Database Service database instance. Normally, you might use each individual service to provision these resources. And after you create the resources, you would have to configure them to work togeth…
See more on docs.aws.amazon.com

Quickly Replicate Your Infrastructure

  • If your application requires additional availability, you might replicate it in multiple regions so that if one region becomes unavailable, your users can still use your application in other regions. The challenge in replicating your application is that it also requires you to replicate your resources. Not only do you need to record all the resources that your application requires, but you must also pro…
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Easily Control and Track Changes to Your Infrastructure

  • In some cases, you might have underlying resources that you want to upgrade incrementally. For example, you might change to a higher performing instance type in your Auto Scaling launch configuration so that you can reduce the maximum number of instances in your Auto Scaling group. If problems occur after you complete the update, you might need to ...
See more on docs.aws.amazon.com

1.What is AWS CloudFormation?

Url:https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/Welcome.html

9 hours ago  · Clouds are formed when warm, moist air rises up, cools down, and condenses into water droplets. There are ten major cloud shapes that fall into four groups based on altitude, or height in the sky.

2.What is AWS CloudFormation? - Hava

Url:https://www.hava.io/blog/what-is-aws-cloudformation

11 hours ago AWS CloudFormation provides users with a simple way to create and manage a collection of Amazon Web Services (AWS) resources by provisioning and updating them in a predictable way. AWS CloudFormation enables you to manage your complete infrastructure or …

3.What is Cloud Formation? - Definition, Types & Process

Url:https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-cloud-formation-definition-types-process.html

6 hours ago  · AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives us an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and third party resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. With the help of CloudFormation we …

4.What Is AWS CloudFormation: Concepts, Templates, and …

Url:https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/aws-tutorial/aws-cloudformation

11 hours ago Clouds With Vertical Development. Cloud Type – Cumulus. Cloud Type – Cumulonimbus. Complete Cycle of Clouds Formation. Clouds Formation Step 1 – Creation of Pressure in The Environment. Clouds Formation Step 2 – Water Vapor Evaporates into the Air. Clouds Formation Step 3 – Water Vapor Condenses to Form a Cloud.

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