Amazon Web Services cooks up CloudFormation
Company is trying a template approach that it hopes will make it as painless as possible to cobble together cloud services.
Larry Dignan
Amazon Web Services today detailed CloudFormation, an effort to make it ridiculously easy to cobble together cloud services.
Here's how CloudFormation works:
• A customer describes what resources--storage, compute, load balancing--are needed.
• CloudFormation figures out how those resources are provisioned.
• Templates put the cloud stack together.
In a blog post, Amazon described CloudFormation as a recipe book.
AWS is programmable, so it should be possible to build even complex systems (sometimes called "stacks") using repeatable processes. Second, the dynamic nature of AWS makes people want to create multiple precise copies of their operating environment. This could be to create extra stacks for development and testing, or to replicate them across multiple AWS Regions.
Read more of "Amazon Web Services launches CloudFormation: Infrastructure recipes" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.