Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced
AWS CloudFormation, a new way for developers and businesses to create
collections of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and
predictable fashion.
AWS continues to innovate around its core cloud computing platform to offer
more and more opportunities to take advantage of the company's core assets in
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and more. AWS CloudFormation is another in a
series of technological advancements AWS has made freely available to its
customers. Most recently, AWS launched the Elastic Beanstalk, which
gave developers an even easier way to quickly deploy and manage applications in
the AWS cloud.
With this new offering, customers can use AWS CloudFormation's sample
templates or create their own templates to describe the AWS resources required
to run their application. AWS CloudFormation then manages the complexity of
provisioning those resources in the required order so developers do not have to
worry about sequencing or interdependencies. AWS CloudFormation is available at
no additional charge—customers pay only for the AWS resources required to run
their applications. To get started using AWS CloudFormation, visit http://aws.amazon.com.
With AWS CloudFormation, customers describe "what" resources are
needed, and AWS CloudFormation takes care of "how" those resources
are provisioned. For example, AWS CloudFormation templates concisely capture
resource relationships, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)
instances that must be associated with an Elastic Load Balancer, or an Amazon
Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) volume that must be in the same Availability
Zone as the Amazon EC2 instance.
These templates free developers from having to think about and navigate
these types of interdependencies. In addition, customers can use AWS
CloudFormation templates to create identical copies of the same AWS
infrastructure stack that will run over and over as needed, removing the need
for developers to manually re-create an application's stack for each
deployment.
"The idea for AWS CloudFormation came to us while we were building our
own applications on top of AWS services," said Adam Selipsky, vice
president of Amazon Web Services, in a statement. "Rather than repeatedly
building the same infrastructure and manually managing the dependencies between
resources each time, our developer teams started creating templates to
seamlessly handle the provisioning.
"We found this to be so useful that we decided to offer it up to our
customers. AWS CloudFormation allows developers and businesses to focus on
their applications while leaving the provisioning details to AWS."
Customers can create CloudFormation templates and deploy the associated
resource stacks via the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation command line
tools or APIs. Moreover, AWS CloudFormation can be used across multiple AWS
Availability Zones to configure a wide range of AWS resources, including Amazon
EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments,
Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances and Amazon Simple
Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics.
"For the release of Dragon Age Legends, EA2D
uses highly automated and dynamic infrastructure running on AWS," said
Mike Babineau, systems architect at EA2D, a new studio within Electronic Arts
that is building cross-platform social games. "While this allows us to
scale seamlessly, provisioning new environments is still a manual process. AWS
CloudFormation eliminates the manual processes and allows our developers to
fire up infrastructure stacks at will. We can now use a single command to
launch a duplicate of our production environment, which is perfect for feature
development, load tests or hotfixes."
Meanwhile, Ylastic, an AWS user and
partner, provides a unified management console service to AWS customers.
"We are really excited about AWS Cloud Formation," said Prabhakar
Chaganti, chief technology officer at Ylastic, in a statement. "We have
integrated management for AWS CloudFormation into Ylastic services and are
releasing it today. This new service simplifies the deployment of resources and
makes it easier to build a wide range of cloud-enabled enterprise and business
applications."
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