Mastering AWS CloudFormation: Plan, develop, and deploy your cloud infrastructure effectively using AWS CloudFormation

Great book. Good overall coverage of cloud formation with plenty of examples and code.

For transparency sake, this book was given to me (for free) by someone promoting the book on LinkedIn.About me: I have almost two decades of experience in IT. About half of that is on the support side, the other half is split between software engineering and devops work. Enough about me, on with the review!The first thing I noticed right away was the language the book starts with. It's not beginner language at all, which is okay. From what I've read it's not supposed to target beginners and instead has a target audience of a somewhat experienced engineer attempting to learn more about CloudFormation, specifically. But this may not be clear to beginners upon reading the sample pages or the index.I also appreciate the brevity of the history lessons in here. I do like learning the 'Why' behind the what, but often authors can get caught up in the history of the subject and lose sight of the subject itself. Thankfully the author does not do this! The quick 'Why' leads directly into the 'What' and we, the readers, get the chance to learn both - but spend significantly more time on the 'What' which is the reason we're all here reading this book.The author starts with a CloudFormation Refresher, which is... refreshing. The links all seem to go where they're supposed to, which is also a rare find for me. Maybe I just have really bad luck with e-books! There is a supplementary code download that comes with the book but there is also a GitHub repository associated with the book and several videos on YouTube as well! Plenty of decent content to help any type of learner consume the material. Lots of good examples in the text as well.As the chapters move on, the content definitely gets deeper and heavier. The further reading sections at the end of each chapter help lighten the burden on the author and provide yet another outlet for the reader to consume more information on the topics covered in the chapter in order to reinforce their learning.One of the few things I didn't like about the book was the focus on the specific cfn-lint tool rather than exploring the general traits of a good linter and what they do, with suggestions for some linters at the end. We don't know how long cfn-lint will remain around, so it will certainly date the book. The other issue I had, which I have with most books written on AWS, is the EC2-centric model they all seem to adopt. I understand it, but there are so many other ways to get your code out there and running in the real world without having to directly create a single EC2 instance. All that said, I think it's admirable that the author attempts to talk about both validation and linting, as these are typically extremely underrepresented topics in most tech books that aren't specifically about validation, linting, and/or testing. And I certainly understand that everyone has to start somewhere, and that somewhere is typically on an EC2 or Elastic Beanstalk.Despite my previous two nagging comments, this book definitely makes for a great map along the long and winding road to becoming a successful Dev*Ops Engineer on the AWS platform.

AWS infrastructure as code has a native solution, CloudFormation. This JSON or YAML based coding system (I use YAML because I don't like typing brackets out), enables you to launch several AWS services at once (and tear them down at once). This is a good first reference before you start deep diving the Amazon documentation.