I’ve been using CloudFormation a lot recently to manage AWS resources. I’m impressed with a lot of the functionality it provides and it has allowed us to delete a lot of code on my current project which was needed to handle edge cases in provisioning AWS resources (eventual consistency issues, for example).

After a couple of months using it seriously, I only have four complaints about CloudFormation:

• Stack lifecycle operations (create/update and delete) are not idempotent.
• Notification topics can only be set up at stack-creation time, so if the topic gets accidentally deleted there is no way to get notifications from the stack.
• Creation and modification of resources in the stack is serialized, which makes operations on large stacks very slow.
• The template syntax is horrible: hard to write and even harder to read.

I can’t claim to have a better solution to the syntax problem. Given the constraints, the current syntax is probably reasonable; and the language itself is extremely well thought-out. Perhaps the long-term solution is to treat the JSON as an intermediary form and write bindings for individual languages to generate it.

However, as things stand, once stacks have more than a couple of resources in them, I find it hard to keep track of what is going on. So I’ve written a tool to vizualize templates. It reads template JSON and spits out Graphviz dot format which can be used to generate an image.

The examples in this post are from the sample templates provided by AWS. You can find generated images for all those samples here.

I’d love to hear from you if you think this is useful.