A workshop to learn AWS CloudFormation

The workshop promotes both the knowledge of CloudFormation concepts and skills, as well as good practices (including Continuous Deployment). For best results, templates should be developed and tested incrementally.

The workshop is structured as a series of code katas (see "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kata_(programming)")

Pre-requisites

• an account on Github and the git version control client
• text editor to edit YAML and JSON files
• AWS account and AWS CLI installed and configured with credentials privileged to operate upon CloudFormation and EC2 resources, etc. Specifically:
  • the user should either have privileges to provision the resources in a stack, OR
  • alternatively, the user should be able to iam:PassRole a role that gives CloudFormation the privileges to provision the resources in a stack
• You can verify the AWS CLI is installed and configured correctly with credentials as follows (output will be similar to the below):

$ aws --profile my-profile sts get-caller-identity --output json
{
    "UserId": "foo",
    "Account": "123456789012",
    "Arn": "arn:aws:sts::123456789012:foo"
}

Instructions

• Review the goal
• Engage in some planning to achieve the goal. This may yield a number of stories, similar to these
• Each story is achieved through a kata. Work through the katas sequentially. While each kata stands on its own, later katas build upon earlier ones.
• Instructions for each kata are documented independently, beginning with kata 1

Cleaning up afterwards!

• At any point, you can delete the resources provisioned and avoid incurring costs by deleting the stacks created
  • Deleting a CloudFormation stack deletes all resources provisioned by the stack
• If you provision any pipelines to deploy other CloudFormation stacks, remember to:
  • IMPORTANT!!! delete the stack provisioned by the pipeline first
  • only delete the pipeline (i.e., the stack that provisioned the pipeline) afterwards. The stack provisioned by the pipeline depends upon IAM roles provisioned by the pipeline, and may be left orphaned if the pipeline is deleted first.
  • TODO: configure the pipelines to provision stacks with termination-protection enabled.

Organisation

• All instructions that involve a filesystem location assume that you are currently in the location where
• Templates and notes for each kata are in a folder in doc named after the kata (say, kata-1)
• Instructions for each kata are in the HOW-TO.md document (say, HOW-TO)
• For each kata, a tested template is provided for reference (say, Story 1 template). You may refer to it at the conclusion of the kata.
• for Continuous Deployment pipelines: tested CloudFormation template and example parameter file to be used to provision stacks for the pipelines are provided
• You may review the observations accompanying a kata, as you work on it (say, observations). The observations contain links to the public documentation.