Building the Infrastructure

Abstract

In the last chapter, I gave an overview the AWS RDS service along with how you can utilize the User Data field to provide commands to set up an EC2 instance at launch time. This is by far the easiest way to set up an instance, download necessary files, and prepare an instance for use. There is another method and service that can be used to manage your AWS infrastructure in a way that allows for easy deployment, updating, and redeployment: CloudFormation. In this chapter, I'll introduce AWS CloudFormation and explain the benefits of using it. You’ll launch several versions of CloudFormation templates, each building on the previous one, and review a sample CloudFormation script that Amazon provides for deploying the WordPress CMS.