How To Troubleshoot AWS CloudFormation Errors?

How To Troubleshoot AWS CloudFormation Errors?

AWS CloudFormation (CFN) helps in automating deployments by delivering Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC). It offers several useful capabilities, like simple templates, support for a wide range of AWS services, dependency management, parallel deployments, and so on. To use CloudFormation, you create CFN templates either from scratch or from samples. You can also use tools like the CloudFormation Designer to author the CFN templates. However, similarly to coding, you will run into errors with CFN as well. In this post, we will cover the two prominent types of CFN errors and how to troubleshoot these.

Types of CloudFormation Errors

There are two types of CFN errors.

1. Syntax Errors: A CFN template is a text document in either JSON or YAML format. The syntax errors in the CFN template lead to this error. For example, a missing comma or brace in JSON, an incorrect indentation in YAML, and so on. Such a template is not even deployed as the CloudFormation Console or the CLI will fail upon detecting the error.
2. Semantic Errors: These occur at deployment time typically due to coding or an infrastructure issue. For example, an incorrectly specified resource property name, trying to…