AWS Releases New Roadmap to Highlight CloudFormation Coverage. To assist cloud customers in planning, Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), has released a new coverage roadmap that simplifies the process for describing and provisioning all infrastructure resources in a CloudFormation environment. CloudFormation allows you to create a text file that models and provides various resources for your application across all platforms and accounts. It acts as a single source of truth for your cloud environment. It automatically creates a stack using template code, then configures the stack with the appropriate resources. The service is associated with the infrastructure-as-code movement, for which the company has published the open source Cloud Development Kit. Jeff Barr, AWS spokesperson, admitted that CloudFormation was not launched in 2011. However, the company still has a long way to go before it can provide complete coverage of all cloud resources and services. Barr stated that CloudFormation usage is growing faster than AWS and that the team has prioritized scaling over complete resource coverage in a recent announcement. “While we still aim to provide 100 percent coverage, the truth is that we will need to work hard to achieve it. CloudFormation Coverage Roadmap is here to help you manage your priorities and be more transparent about them. [Click on the image to see a larger version.] CloudFormation Coverage Map (source: Amazon Web Services) The roadmap contains four categories. The project FAQ provides these descriptions.

• Shipped — should be obvious
• Soon — close to completion, likely being planned in advance for a forthcoming coverage update release. This category is generally a few weeks out, but Barr said that it was “generally a few more months out” in his post.
• We are still working on it, in progress, but further out. We may still be working on the implementation details or scoping out things.
• Researching — We are still thinking about it. This could mean that we are still evaluating designs and options or thinking about how it should work. This is a great time to give us feedback on how you would like to see something implemented. Your specific use cases will be very helpful to us.

Barr also provided some Cloud Development Kit “goodies” for the infrastructure-as-code approach, including:

• CDK Home Page — Get started!
• AWS Cloud Development Kit CDK – TypeScript & Python Now Generally Available — Danilo recently posted a blog post announcing general availability.
• CDK Developer Guide — Learn how you can use the CDK.
• CDK Workshop — This workshop provides step-by-step instructions in both TypeScript as Python.
• CDK All The Things — A Whirlwind Tour – Cloud consultant Kevin Lin from Thence Consulting wrote this detailed review of CDK.
• CDK Custom Resource Example — How to add a custom resource in a CDK application.

Barr also addressed the ongoing wait for CloudFormation coverage. Before I close, I want to address one common observation — that AWS is part and parcel of a large company, and that we should just throw more resources at it. Although the team is growing, implementing secure, robust coverage is still difficult. Consider the following quote from the Mythical Man-Month. “Good cooking takes time.” If you are made wait, it is to make you more satisfied and to serve you better.