Simplifying CloudFormation Stack Management
Ylastic just released several enhancements for CloudFormation stack management. Our initial implementation of the UI was done when CloudFormation was first released, and it is now a rather large and complex service that enables you to reference and use resources from a lot of different services in the AWS stable. The increase in complexity leads to a quick proliferation of the number of resources that comprise your stack, and correspondingly needs a simpler way to get your head around what is in your stack. You launch this wonderful stack that creates instances, databases, Route53 resource records, autoscaling groups and so on. How do you actually view all of these resources that are part of your stack? No, we do not want to view a rather large incomprehensible table that lists just the physical ids for resources, as it is completely worthless in terms of getting any work done. And no, we do not mean navigating to 20 different pages to view them. We mean a single place to view your resources and additional information for each resource. Here we go ..
All the resources in a stack are displayed on this page, separated by the service that they are part of. Additional and meaningful information for each resource is also presented. For example, if you are viewing the instances that comprise your stack, you can view other info for the instance such as AMI id, zones, uptime, cloudwatch data, etc.
There is also an easier way to view the JSON template definition associated with the stack. We added a nicely formatted representation of your stack template. You can even expand and collapse various sections in the template as you like.
Stacks have a cost associated with them like most resources in AWS. We like knowing the money that we are spending on AWS, and knowing the expenses that are being incurred for a stack is very, very useful. We now display the estimated costs for each stack computed for two different time periods:
- Estimated month to date cost for running the stack.
- Estimated cost to run the stack for the whole year.
Finally, another thing that we use a lot when using stacks - the ability to view cloudwatch charts for a resource. Each resource such as instance, elb, volumes, etc will display a little sparkline graph for the CPU util or similar metric for the last 20 minutes. Click on the sparkline to display detailed cloudwatch charts for the selected resource.
Manage your AWS cloud the easier way :-)
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