Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Secure Dependencies
Explore how to automate infrastructure provisioning for machine learning on AWS using Infrastructure as Code with CloudFormation and CDK. Understand securing software dependencies with CodeArtifact to protect training environments. Learn strategies for cost optimization and environment consistency to support scalable, secure ML workflows.
In the previous lesson on ML workflow orchestration, you saw how SageMaker Pipelines, Step Functions, and MWAA coordinate the stages of a machine learning life cycle. But every orchestrated workflow runs on infrastructure, including compute instances, storage buckets, networking configurations, and IAM roles, which someone must provision. When that provisioning happens through manual console clicks, the result is environment drift, security gaps, and the classic “it works on my machine” failure that derails ML projects in production. This lesson addresses the infrastructure layer directly.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing compute, networking, and storage through version-controlled templates rather than manual configuration. For the AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate exam, you need to understand three services that form the IaC and dependency-security foundation for ML workloads. AWS CloudFormation provides declarative IaC through JSON or YAML templates. AWS CDK offers programmatic IaC using general-purpose languages like Python. AWS CodeArtifact secures the software supply chain by managing package dependencies internally. By the end of this lesson, you will be able to automate resource provisioning, ensure environment consistency across ML stages, secure software artifacts, and optimize costs through code-driven configurations.
AWS CloudFormation fundamentals
AWS CloudFormation is the native declarative IaC service on AWS. You define your desired infrastructure state in a JSON or YAML template, submit it to CloudFormation, and the service provisions and configures every specified resource in the correct order, handling dependency resolution automatically.
Key abstractions
CloudFormation organizes infrastructure management around a small set of concepts that map directly to the ML deployment life cycle.
Templates serve as the blueprint: a single file that declares every resource, its properties, and its relationships to other resources in the stack.
Stacks represent a ...