Amazon Web Services are widely used in digital businesses these days. That is possible because everybody heard about services such as EC2, SQS, or S3. Those are used heavily in production systems and they work well. In 2020, AWS offers more than 175 services. You can imagine that it’s hard to remember all of them. As a result, while some of them can be very helpful, nobody talks about them.

So I prepared a list of four services on AWS that your team could benefit from.

1. CloudFormation

CloudFormation is a service that enables us to describe infrastructure as code. Infrastructure as code is a well-known practice to set out and manage IT infrastructure through the configuration files. With CloudFormation, we can define all required components and dependencies between them.

There are a few benefits to having everything in configuration files. First, it makes it possible to speed up the processes, as the task stays only within the code. No navigation between different services and connecting them through the user interface. Second, it adds more reliability and reduces human errors. The code can be reviewed by other engineers, and in case of mistake, the changes can be reverted quickly.

For example, the following piece of code creates a new S3 bucket under your account:

As you can see, only seven lines of code can create a new S3 bucket with a default setup at any moment. No need to do the job manually through the AWS console.

CloudFormation supports two formats: JSON and YAML. Besides that, CloudFormation offers features such as nested stacks, exporting values, or passing parameters between stacks. Indeed, it is a very powerful service to maintain the whole company’s infrastructure.

CloudFormation is a free service and you need to pay only for provisioned components.

#cloud #programming #software-development #aws #cloud-computing