Category: How-To

With cost allocation tagging and the AWS Cost Explorer, you can see the cost of operating each of your AWS CloudFormation stacks. Here’s how it works.  AWS CloudFormation automatically tags each stack resource. For example, if you have a stack that creates an Amazon EC2 instance, AWS CloudFormation automatically tags the instance with the following […]

When you create AWS CloudFormation templates, you might find that you’re continually describing the same set of resources in different templates. However, instead of repeatedly adding them to each of your templates, consider using nested stacks. What are Nested Stacks With nested stacks, you can link to a template from within any other template. You […]

When you delete a stack, by default AWS CloudFormation deletes all stack resources so that you aren’t left with any strays. This also means any data that you have stored in your stack are also deleted (unless you take manual snapshots).  For example, data stored in Amazon EC2 volumes or Amazon RDS database instances are […]

Invalid input for parameter values is the number one reason for stack creation failures. To make it easier to enter the correct parameter values and to improve parameter validation, the AWS CloudFormation team recently added the ability to set additional data types for parameters. Parameter types enable CloudFormation to validate inputs earlier in the stack […]

(This post has been updated on October 1, 2018 to reflect the deprecation of GitHub services. You can learn more about this deprecation here. We now recommend setting up automatic deployments from GitHub using AWS CodePipeline and AWS CodeDeploy.) AWS CodeDeploy is a service that makes it easy to deploy application updates to Amazon EC2 […]

AWS CloudFormation simplifies provisioning on AWS. You can apply software engineering best practices such as version control, code reviews, unit tests, and continuous integration to the AWS CloudFormation templates, the same way you apply those best practices to your application code. For example, with application code, you can add descriptive comments to help you document various portions […]

Today Jeff Barr blogged about a new feature that gives users the ability to deploy and operate applications on existing Amazon EC2 instances and on-premises servers with AWS OpsWorks. You may know OpsWorks as a service that lets users deploy and manage applications. However OpsWorks can also perform operational tasks that simplify server management. This […]

AWS OpsWorks lets you deploy and manage application of all shapes and sizes. OpsWorks layers let you create blueprints for EC2 instances to install and configure any software that you want. This blog will show you how to create a custom layer for Docker. For an overview of Docker, see https://www.docker.com/tryit. Docker lets you precisely […]

Did you know that Elastic Beanstalk supports attaching and customizing ephemeral and EBS volumes to Elastic Beanstalk environments without the need for custom AMIs? This feature provides Elastic Beanstalk users with the ability to utilize: 1.     Ephemeral storage via instance store volumes available on the physical EC2 machine. See Instance Stores Available on Instance Types […]

Amazon CloudWatch Logs was announced last month in the US East (Northern Virginia) region. If you’re running an Elastic Beanstalk environment in us-east-1, this brief overview will describe how you can quickly and easily begin to use CloudWatch Logs to monitor your web server logs. We’ll follow the Elastic Beanstalk Developer Guide to configure an Elastic […]