aws-cloudformation-templates VS aws-cloudformation-reference

Still, have a look at the CFN example repo for what you're trying to do. You'll see that even AWS chose to not bother with userdata

If you don't like using CLI tools and just prefer to start using the CloudFormation templates directly by yourself then this repo has some examples configurations for load balanced services in various networking configurations: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates/tree/master/aws/services/ECS

ECS has it's own format, which is not a direct 1:1 mapping from Docker Compose to ECS service / task definitions. You have to either use a prebuilt tool that does that mapping for your (like the Docker Compose context) or write your own service and task definitions from scratch. If you want to write them in the YAML format then CloudFormation would be the best bet. There are some sample YAML definitions for ECS here: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates/tree/master/aws/services/ECS

Example can be found here: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates/blob/master/community/services/EC2/ec2_with_waitcondition_template.json *Note it doesn’t haven’t to be as long at that example. Just needs to show a basic functionality with obvious misconfigurations.

If you have special networking needs, or already know AWS pretty well and want it integrated into your environment then you can just build it in EC2. You can either use an AMI from the marketplace to get started or just install it yourself. If going this route and you want to "scale" I'd recommend also setting up an RDS database. You can add a load balancer for SSL termination and have AWS automatically rotate the certificates for you and make sure you enable scheduled AMI and/or RDS snapshots for backups. For OS patching you can use either unattended-upgrades or AWS patch manager. A benefit of this method is that it can be pretty well automated with CloudFormation. Such as with this AWS Labs template:\ https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates/blob/master/aws/solutions/WordPress_Single_Instance.yaml

A is correct = https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates/blob/master/aws/services/DynamoDB/DynamoDB_Secondary_Indexes.yaml

Yea, the documentation is a mess, I would recommend checking out the github with samples instead. https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates

🔗 https://github.com/awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates

For anyone reading this and wondering how to build all of this infrastructure, I do have some templates that would be a good starting point. For the versioned S3 bucket to hold deployment packages, I suggest using this template. For an API that uses a Lambda function for computing, I suggest using this template. It also contains the correct parameters to use a deployment package from a versioned S3 bucket. For anyone trying to learn AWS and wanting some additional help figuring things out, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with me. I would be more than happy to help out where I can!

Sure! My blog is https://thomasstep.com/ and the repo where I keep a bunch of CloudFormation templates is https://github.com/thomasstep/aws-cloudformation-reference

This template is also available in my aws-cloudformation-reference repository. I also made a video of me creating the template in case the process of building and deploying something like this from scratch is of interest.

A few months ago I had heard about AWS Fargate as a serverless computing platform for containers. I had good experiences with AWS's other serverless offerings and I wanted to get into containers more so Fargate seemed like a good next learning opportunity. I remember trying to spin a few resources up just to start messing around with the platform. At the end of the day, I ended up with an ECS cluster and some misconfigured services. I didn't realize that there were multiple different resources needed just to get a simple API container up and running. I recently worked through creating an ECS cluster, load balancer, Fargate service, and task definition with CloudFormation. I also made a video out of building the template and debugging along the way here's part 1 and here's part 2 (I apologize for the quiet audio). In the end, I created one template for the ECS cluster, load balancer, and other shared resources that could be shared across multiple Fargate services, one template for the Fargate service, task definition, and load balancer listener, and a tiny Dockerized hello world app.

Creating a VPC feels like a rite of passage of sorts to AWS. VPC stands for Virtual Private Cloud, and every AWS account comes with a default VPC already created for us when we get there. VPCs are a way to keep cloud resources isolated. I recently created a CloudFormation template for a basic VPC and I wanted to share a few different pieces that went into building it. Having a basic understanding of networking will probably be beneficial to understand these concepts.

I have been updating my CloudFormation reference repo on GitHub lately, and I wanted to bring up one of the newly added templates. This template builds a serverless RDS instance, generates a password for that instance, adds a secret to Secrets Manager, and allows for an instance to be built off of an existing snapshot. I also took a screen capture of me building and debugging that template that is available on YouTube if you care to watch how I built it.