Cloudformation Exercises

A series of 3-4 part self-guided exercises for exposure to AWS services

I recently completed a series of AWS certifications. While studying, I set a goal for myself to build a full CloudFormation template every day over a month. The result was 25 CloudFormation exercises, which I've diagrammed and documented for others to follow.

The templates...

• have no dependencies
• are often very simplistic
• increase in complexity
• reuse patterns from earlier exercises

The exercises...

• are intentionally vague to encourage research
• are intentionally unrefined to encourage experimentation

Disclaimers

• Most of these can be done on free tier. They are very lightweight and should incur very little billing, but please keep an eye on it.
• Most exercises do not use the principle of least privilege.
• These are not production ready.
• These are not production ready.

Topics (last updated 2/21)

• 1. S3 encryption, replication
• 2. EC2, VPC, NACL
• 3. EC2, EBS, EFS
• 4. Bastion pattern, NAT gateway pattern
• 5. KMS, CloudTrail
• 6. IPv6, EIP, egress-only gateway
• 7. ENI, flow logs
• 8. Cloudwatch agent, SSM, cfn-init
• 9. httpd server, Global Accelerator
• 10. EC2 Auto Scaling, Launch Templates, Cloudwatch Alarms
• 11. ECR, ECS (Fargate mode), Launch Templates
• 12. ECR, ECS (EC2 + network mode), Autoscaling Groups, Launch Configurations
• 13. RDS Multi-AZ, RDS Read Replicas
• 14. Network load balancer, load balancer listeners, Forward LB action
• 15. Application load balancer, sticky sessions, FixedResponse LB action
• 16. Lambda, API Gateway
• 17. Lambda, SQS, SNS
• 18. Route53 health checks, Route53 public hosted zones, failover
• 19. S3 static hosting, CloudFront, WAF, Lambda@Edge, Lambda versions
• 20. SSH forwarding, VPC interface endpoint, VPC gateway endpoint
• 21. Spot fleets, Kinesis, EventBridge, Step Functions
• 22. DynamoDB tables, streams and triggers, GSI, LSI, DAX
• 23. CodeCommit, CodeBuild, CodeDeploy, CodePipeline
• 24. Cognito user pools, identity pools, application clients, Cognito LambdaConfig
• 25. Elastic Beanstalk configuration, extensions, versions