{"id":10353,"date":"2025-01-26T18:37:03","date_gmt":"2025-01-26T18:37:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/?p=10353"},"modified":"2025-01-26T18:37:03","modified_gmt":"2025-01-26T18:37:03","slug":"aws-cloudformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/aws-cloudformation\/","title":{"rendered":"AWS CloudFormation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Disclaimer: This post sat in draft for a while as I’m not using AWS at the moment I cannot guarantee that all works still or the post is 100% complete, but I’m going to publish it anyway, in case it’s of use.<\/em><\/p>\n

AWS CloudFormation is a service that is essentially a way to group together AWS resources into a stack<\/em>. We can define the stack using the AWS Dashboard or using either JSON or YAML.<\/p>\n

For example, in JSON<\/p>\n

\r\n{\r\n  "Resources": {\r\n    "S3Bucket": {\r\n      "Type": "AWS::S3::Bucket",\r\n      "Properties": {\r\n        "BucketName": "mybucket"\r\n      }\r\n    }\r\n  }\r\n}\r\n<\/pre>\n
or in YAML<\/p>\n
\r\nResources:\r\n  S3Bucket:\r\n    Type: 'AWS::S3::Bucket'\r\n    Properties:\r\n      BucketName: mybucket\r\n<\/pre>\n
In this example the S3 bucket will be created within the Stack<\/em>. Remember the bucket name must be unique across all accounts.<\/p>\n
    \n
  • From the dashboard type CloudFormation<\/em> into the search box<\/li>\n
  • Once you’re on the CloudFormation<\/em> page click the Create stack<\/em> button<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
    From the Create stack<\/em> page you can select a JSON or YAML template from your local machine, an Amazon S3 URL or from a Git repos. using the Template is ready<\/em> option. Or you can Use a sample template<\/em> to load a pre-existing stack, for example LAMP, Ruby on Rails, WordPress etc. Or you can select the Create template in designer<\/em> option to use the stack designer.<\/p>\n
    Let’s see what we can do with CloudFormation<\/em> by creating our simple Echo service web API and let some tools generate our CloudFormation<\/em> configuration file for us.<\/p>\n
    Setting up our credentials<\/strong><\/p>\n
    First we’re going to need to set up our credentials. <\/p>\n
    You’ll hopefully have stored the credentials when you create your IAM user, access id and secret are what’s required for this next step.<\/em><\/p>\n
    If you prefer to handle this from a UI such as Visual Studio Extensions, then you can use the edit credential button in the AWS Explorer<\/em> (load via the menu View | AWS Explorer) but let’s first do this ourselves.<\/p>\n
    Credentials are obviously meant to be kept secret, so they’re stored on your local machine in the folder C:\\Users\\<your-username>\\.aws<\/em> in the file named credentials<\/em>. The file is an INI type file and should look like this when you’ve added your credentials<\/p>\n
    \r\n[profilename]\r\naws_access_key_id = IDSUPPLIEDBYAWS\r\naws_secret_access_key = SECRETSUPPLIEDBYAWS\r\n<\/pre>\n
    The profilename<\/em> is the profile name as seen in tools such as AWS Explorer or will be used in the CLI, this allows us to have multiple access key\/secrets for multiple apps. <\/p>\n
    Note: if you edit this file via AWS Explorer it will add further information to the profile<\/em><\/p>\n
    Using Visual Studio Extensions<\/strong><\/p>\n
    If you install the AWS extensions for Visual Studio, you can create CloudFormation<\/em> based applications using the project templates. If you create yourself a project based upon AWS Serverless Application (.NET Core – C#)<\/em> for example, you’ll then get the option to choose a project type, I chose Minimal Wweb API.<\/p>\n
    The resultant project includes everything you need to build and deploy your application to AWS serverless. <\/p>\n
    For example from Visual Studio 2022 with the current AWS Extensions installed<\/p>\n
      \n
    • Create a new project, select AWS Serverless Application (.NET Core – C#)<\/em> or the with Tests<\/em> version<\/li>\n
    • Once create simply replace the minimal API root method with the following\n
      \r\napp.MapGet("\/", () => "Use \/echo?text=<text>");\r\napp.MapGet("\/echo", (string text) => $"Echo: {text}");\r\n<\/pre>\n<\/li>\n
    • Open the serverless.template<\/em> file and change the Descriptiom<\/em> to something meaningful to your project<\/li>\n
    • Build and run locally to check everything works, i.e. \/echo?text=Scooby<\/em> should echo back Scooby<\/em><\/li>\n
    • We can now simply right mouse click on the serverless.template<\/em> file and select Publish to AWS Lambda<\/em><\/li>\n
    • From the Publish to AWS Lambda<\/em> popup, enter a Stack Name<\/em> if it doesn’t exist it will be created<\/li>\n
    • Enter an S3 Bucket<\/em> name or click the New<\/em> button and supply a name<\/li>\n
    • You might need to change the AWS Credentials<\/em> if required for your specific application and Region<\/em><\/li>\n
    • Click Publish<\/em> and if all goes well, your application will be published to a stack in AWS and upon completion the AWS extension will show the URL for you service and you can go and try it<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
      At this point if you log into AWS using the same IAM account that your stack was deployed to, go to CloudFormation<\/em> and you’ll see our stack was added, it should show Status<\/em> as CREATE_COMPLETE<\/em> it’ll have the desription we changed in the serverless.template<\/em> file. In the Outputs<\/em> tab we can see the ApiURL (in case you forgot to note it down). <\/p>\n
      Now if you enter S3<\/em> into the search box and go and look at our buckets, you’ll see the bucket we created and finally if you enter Lambda<\/em> into the search box and go to the Lambda Functions<\/em> page you’ll see the function name for our Web API.<\/p>\n
      I’m not going to dig too much into the serverless.template<\/em> file but note that the Type<\/em><\/p>\n
      \r\n"Type": "AWS::Serverless::Function",\r\n<\/pre>\n
      Essentially creates the web API as a lamba function, sets up the IAM execution role and adds the HTTP triggers to invoke the function.<\/p>\n
      Valid types are as followis<\/p>\n
        \n
      • AWS::Serverless::Function<\/strong> as already looked at this will create the Lambda function, the execution role and any required triggers<\/li>\n
      • AWS::Serverless::Api<\/strong> denotes a resource type for creating an API Gateway<\/li>\n
      • AWS::Serverless::HttpApi<\/strong> denotes a resource type used to create REST API’s<\/li>\n
      • AWS::Serverless::SimpleTable<\/strong> denotes a resource type to create a DynamoDB table with a single primary key<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
        Disclaimer: This post sat in draft for a while as I’m not using AWS at the moment I cannot guarantee that all works still or the post is 100% complete, but I’m going to publish it anyway, in case it’s of use. AWS CloudFormation is a service that is essentially a way to group together […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[700],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aws"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10353"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11251,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10353\/revisions\/11251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/putridparrot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}