Tag: Amazon CloudFormation

SCAR: static website deployment on AWS

SCAR is a deployment stack for static websites. It’s not exactly a single-click process, but it is as simple as possible. The name is the abbreviation from the Amazon AWS services which are utilized for the deployment: S3, CloudFront, Amazon Certificate Manager, and Route 53.

The whole thing is built via the Amazon CloudFormation, and shouldn’t require much of tinkering with the services or reading lengthy documentation pages. This bit should also motivate you to try it out:

How much will this cost?


For most sites, it will likely cost less than $1 per month. The cost for a Route 53 hosted zone is fixed at $0.50/month; the remaining CloudFront and S3 costs depend on the levels of traffic, but typically amount to a few cents for small levels of traffic.

7 Awesome CloudFormation Hacks

Amazon CloudFormation templates are a bit tricky to write, regardless of whether you are working on your first one or you have been doing it for years. Sure, there are plenty of examples online, tools that make it easier (thanks Ansible!), and copy-pasting sections from your own library. But any tips on how to make the life easier are always welcome.

Hence, here’s a very handy collection of “7 Awesome CloudFormation Hacks“. These include:

  1. Combine two sequent intrinsic functions
  2. Use exported values from other stacks in !Sub
  3. Changes in cfn-init don’t trigger redeployment in AutoScaling Group
  4. Get Stack name of sibling stack in nested stacks
  5. AccountIds with leading zero
  6. Use Dictionaries as Stack Parameter
  7. DependsOn with condition

AWS CloudFormation Sample Templates

awslabs/aws-cloudformation-templates is an extensive collection of Amazon AWS CloudFormation templates for a wide range of resources and services. Some of these can be used as is for deploying production infrastructure, others are good starting points for those of us who are still learning.

Build load-balanced servers in AWS EC2 using CloudFormation

“Build load-balanced servers in AWS EC2 using CloudFormation” is an excellent guide on deploying load balancer servers with EC2 instances to Amazon AWS cloud with CloudFormation infrastructure management tool. The guide covers a variety of topics from the actual deployment to security and monitoring.

There are many different approaches for load balancing traffic in Amazon AWS, and this one is not a holy grail solution, but it provides plenty of insight into available tools and options.

Using CloudFoundation to Build, Manage, and Deploy CloudFormation Templates


J Cole Morrison has this rather lengthy blog post on how to use CloudFoundation to simplify and automate the management of your Amazon AWS cloud infrastructure.  AWS CloudFormation is a great tool, but it gets complex real fast with larger setups, so CloudFoundation comes to the rescue.