AWS CloudFormation allows users to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources called a stack. It obeys the laws of dealing with infrastructure as code and helps maintain a highly secure, manageable, and scalable infrastructure. CloudFormation helper scripts are a set of tools AWS provides to facilitate the deployment and configuration of resources provisioned using AWS CloudFormation templates. These helper scripts enable users to automate the initialization and setup of Amazon EC2 instances within a CloudFormation stack.
You’ll start this Cloud Lab by first exploring the use case for a to-do list React application and its Node.js backend server and how you can execute the AWS::CloudFormation::Init metadata with the cfn-init helper script. You’ll learn to signal CloudFormation that the cfn-init helper script has been executed using the cfn-signal helper script. You’ll also learn to use the cfn-hup helper script as a daemon to re-execute the cfn-init helper script if a CloudFormation resource’s metadata is changed. Finally, you’ll learn to fetch a CloudFormation resource’s metadata using the cfn-get-metadata helper script.
Learning the skill set associated with AWS CloudFormation helper scripts will equip you with the ability to efficiently manage and automate infrastructure on AWS. With this skill set, you’ll be able to design, deploy, and update AWS resources in a scalable and repeatable manner.
Here’s the high-level architecture diagram of the infrastructure that you’ll create in this Cloud Lab:
