How To: Render AWS CloudFormation templates with Docker
If your infrastructure runs on AWS and you’re not yet using CloudFormation, you should give it a go. CloudFormation (from here on, “CFN”) is a powerful member of the AWS toolbox that allows you to declare every part of your infrastructure in JSON and “load” it into AWS, which then creates the resources your CFN template describes. Come back to this post once you’ve read up on the basics. If you are a regular CFN user, read on.
It was the best of formats, it was the worst of formats.
- Charles Dickens (sysadmin, no relation to the author)
Okay, so CFN is incredibly powerful. Defining and parameterizing your infrastructure makes it much easier to launch the same resources in different contexts, cutting down on the care and feeding of your environments. Alas, CFN has a downside - its templates are written in JSON. JSON is a great format, for machines. Hand-writing long JSON documents...