cloudformation-guard VS aws-cloudformation-coverage-roadmap

If you now use these services to fix the infrastructure findings, a drift occurs that is not always easy to fix. It is better to check for possible problems before the actual deployment. This approach is called “Shift-Left”. This can be done with the package cdk-validator-cfnguard. It's based on the CloudFormation Guard package.

AWS Config rules allow you to determine if a resource is compliant or not. Previously when you wanted to do custom checks you needed to write AWS Lambda functions to validate the configuration of a resource. Since Aug 2, 2022 you have the ability to use cfn-guard rules to achieve the same.

In my previous blog, How do you prove that your infrastructure is compliant. I explained how you can prove your infrastructure is compliant using CloudFormation Guard. But, how do you write those rules? And even more important, how do you test your rules? If you look at the repository CloudFormation Guard. You will notice that the project itself offers a testing framework. Alright! Let’s build a ruleset and write some tests for it!

When you use CloudFormation Guard in combination with CodeBuild Reports it makes it easier to see what rules have failed and keeps a history. When you have a solid set of compliance rules. It gives you a report that you can use to prove that the build of the infrastructure was compliant. You are also able to prevent non-compliant code rollout in production.

cloudformation-guard.

AWS CloudFormation: can help with deploying compliant stacks. You can make sure that a stack is compliant by using AWS CloudFormation guard.

See https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cloudformation-guard

Currently, we're also exploring the brand new AWS Config rules backed by guard. Now you can write rules using guard which is a policy-as-code language. Here is some example of a Guard Rule which we are testing.

https://github.com/aws-cloudformation/cloudformation-guard is also very useful, but more so when you want to keep your templates consistent to standards.

Given AWS CloudFormation is AWS's native language and service for infrastructure as code, you will likely find more official quickstarts provided by AWS in the language. In addition to this, AWS Support will probably be more capable of assisting you with issues when you need help. AWS Support is essential for large enterprises, particularly those new to the cloud or slow to adopt. These types of organizations may have a skill gap within their organization regarding their cloud skill set, and in turn, they are more likely to use AWS Enterprise Support.

Today, I will show you how to build Amazon Location Service, which allows you to build location-based applications within your AWS environment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. I will also show examples of the recently popular CDK Migrate and AWS CloudFormation IaC generator.

AWS CloudFormation: Speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption, which can be called microservices if you have a lot of them. And often microservices use advanced networking options such as a service mesh instead of just the native private network offered by a VPC.

Cloudformation (IaC) does not need to be introduced to anyone, plus if you read the previous blogpost, the terraform provider (CC) we used is based on Cloudformation. Moreover, you will notice a lot of similarities, after all, we are implementing the same scenario, but with a different tool.

AWS Application Composer launched in the AWS Console at re:Invent one year ago, and this re:Invent it expanded to the VS Code IDE as part of the AWS Toolkit - but that’s not the only exciting part. When using App Composer in the IDE, users also get access to a generative AI partner that will help them write infrastructure as code (IaC) for all 1100+ AWS CloudFormation resources that Application Composer now supports.

CloudFormation

Of course, best practices today dictate that we should be deploying our infrastructure as code, using tools such as CloudFormation or Terraform.

If you're provisioning the above resources for the first time, you'll have to either configure Terraform to use specific AWS keys as you won't have OIDC connection yet. In my case, I chose to have those pre-requesites resources in a CloudFormation template and deploy them with StackSets.