CloudFormation vs Terraform awareness in AWS - Hands-On Comparison

CloudFormation vs Terraform Awareness

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud engineer who needs to understand the basics of two popular infrastructure tools: AWS CloudFormation and Terraform. Both help you create and manage cloud resources, but they use different ways to describe your infrastructure.Imagine you want to create a simple cloud setup with a virtual server. You will write small pieces of code to represent this setup in both CloudFormation and Terraform formats.

🎯 Goal: Build simple configuration snippets for AWS EC2 instance creation using both CloudFormation and Terraform syntax. This will help you see how each tool defines infrastructure and understand their differences.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a CloudFormation template snippet defining an EC2 instance with a specific name and instance type.

Create a Terraform configuration snippet defining an EC2 instance with the same name and instance type.

Add a variable or parameter to each snippet to specify the instance type.

Show the final combined snippets representing the EC2 instance creation in both tools.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Cloud engineers often need to write infrastructure code to create and manage cloud resources. Knowing both CloudFormation and Terraform helps them work with different teams and projects.

💼 Career

Understanding these tools is essential for roles like Cloud Engineer, DevOps Engineer, and Site Reliability Engineer, as they automate cloud infrastructure deployment and management.

1

Create CloudFormation EC2 Instance Snippet

Create a CloudFormation template snippet that defines an EC2 instance resource named MyEC2Instance with the instance type t2.micro. Use the resource type AWS::EC2::Instance and set the InstanceType property to t2.micro.

AWS

# Write the CloudFormation resource snippet for MyEC2Instance here

Need a hint?

Use YAML format with Resources as the root key. Define MyEC2Instance under it with the correct type and properties.

2

Add CloudFormation Parameter for Instance Type

Add a CloudFormation Parameters section to your template with a parameter named InstanceTypeParam. Set its type to String and default value to t2.micro. Then update the InstanceType property of MyEC2Instance to use this parameter with !Ref InstanceTypeParam.

AWS

Resources:
  MyEC2Instance:
    Type: AWS::EC2::Instance
    Properties:
      InstanceType: t2.micro
# Add Parameters section and update InstanceType to use !Ref InstanceTypeParam

Need a hint?

Parameters go at the top level. Use !Ref to refer to the parameter inside the resource properties.

3

Create Terraform EC2 Instance Snippet

Create a Terraform configuration snippet that defines an AWS EC2 instance resource named my_ec2_instance using the resource type aws_instance. Set the instance_type attribute to t2.micro and the ami attribute to ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0 (a common Amazon Linux 2 AMI).

AWS

# Write the Terraform resource snippet for my_ec2_instance here

Need a hint?

Use Terraform HCL syntax. The resource block starts with resource "aws_instance" "my_ec2_instance".

4

Add Terraform Variable for Instance Type

Add a Terraform variable named instance_type with a default value of t2.micro. Then update the instance_type attribute of my_ec2_instance resource to use this variable with var.instance_type.

AWS

variable "instance_type" {
  default = "t2.micro"
}

resource "aws_instance" "my_ec2_instance" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  # Update instance_type to use var.instance_type
}

Need a hint?

Define variables outside resource blocks. Use var.instance_type inside the resource to refer to the variable.