A First Look at AWS CloudFormation IaC Generator
An overview of the IaC Generator feature for CloudFormation, released in February 2024.
Situation
One of the top benefits of VMware Cloud on AWS is the ability to augment workloads with native AWS services. One of my jobs on the VMware Specialist SA team here at AWS is to build lab content demonstrating integrations between native AWS services and VMware Cloud on AWS. We use these demonstrations in our Immersion Day Workshop to give customers hands-on access to these integrations.
CloudFormation is Amazon's Infrastructure-as-Code tool. Any resource that needs to be made available to a customer in a workshop needs to be created using CloudFormation. I create this code in many different ways. Sometimes I find code that another team has built for a similar purpose and can re-use it. Other times I have a pretty good handle on what I need to do and start coding immediately in VS Code, letting CodeWhisperer help me generate code as I go. Sometimes it's a brand new service, or a brand new area of a service for me, and I will ask Amazon Q to help me start from scratch.
Regardless of how I eventually generate the code, I almost always create resources by hand before I start trying to automate, particularly if the service I'm working with is new to me. You need to fully understand what you're building before you try to automate it. When I saw the release announcement for AWS IaC Generator, I knew I had to try it out right away. IaC Generator can see resources you create in your account, and will generate the necessary CloudFormation code to recreate those resources. I expect testing to demonstrate that the new feature will speed up my development cycle by automating what I build by hand.
Task
Test IaC Generator by pointing it to resources I already have in one of my accounts.
Actions
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You can find the link to IaC inside the CloudFormation section of the console
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Scan the resources in my account. This can take some time.
Scan in progress...
Scan complete!
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Now that all of the resources in my account have been scanned, I create a new CloudFormation template.
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I name my template.
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I want to generate code for an EC2 instance and related resources. All scanned resources found in my account are listed here. I search for my EC2 instance ID and find my instance in the list of resources.
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IaC generator automatically finds related resources. It found my instance's volume, VPC, network interface, subnet, and security group!
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Template generation is complete
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I now have a CloudFormation template that I can run to re-create the resources that I built manually in my account. Here is a snippet of the Security Group code that IaC generated.
Results
IaC Generator will significantly speed up my development cycle as I introduce new integrations in our our Immersion Day workshops. I have to create the resources I need by hand, which is a step I am doing anyway as part of testing. IaC Generator then builds the code I need automatically!
Powerful feature. I just did a quick hands-on to realize the power. Sharing the recorded demo in case anyone wants to see this feature in action. https://youtu.be/ilXROl36J5Q
Did you actually managed to re-create your setup using the generated template? I did a similar test where I had an EC2 instance and EBS volume. The code that come out had resources for both instance & volume and then also the attachment like below. While this work fine for importing the existing resources into a new stack, you won't be able to run this to re-create the instance as hard-coded InstanceId and VolumeId wouldn't match with the resources created from the template :-/
EC2VolumeAttachment00vol06b7d183e4bb867a700jaYoF:
UpdateReplacePolicy: "Retain"
Type: "AWS::EC2::VolumeAttachment"
DeletionPolicy: "Retain"
Properties:
InstanceId: "i-060079affca8f6dba"
VolumeId: "vol-06b7d183e4bb867a7"
Device: "/dev/xvda"
But I agree this gives you a template as a starting point, it just wouldn't work out-of-the-box.
I did not attempt an immediate re-import, I needed the generated code as a starting point to augment a different CF template.
You can use aspects to put the correct properties on the resource and then it should work.
Just try it, do a cdk diff and you will see that there are no differences between your stack and the resources in your account.
This looks great, is this possible to do the import to stack step without accessing AWS Management Console. Official documentation mentions steps to scan, create or update template through cli. But import to stack possible through cli or sdk? This will help in automating import of lot our resources
I am not interested in creating new resource but trying to import existing resource into a new stack through IaC generator
Are you trying to do something like this? See the AWS CLI syntax toward the bottom. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/resource-import-existing-stack.html
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