Extending CloudFormation and CDK with Third-Party Extensions
March 31, 2023Did you know you can use CloudFormation to manage third-party resources? The AWS CloudFormation Public Registry provides a searchable collection of CloudFormation extensions and makes it easy to discover and provision them in CloudFormation templates and AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) applications. In the past three months, we’ve added a number of new, exciting partners to the Public Registry, including GitLab, Okta, and PagerDuty.
The extensions available on the registry are wide-ranging and include third-party resources from partners such as MongoDB; hooks, which are preventative controls that add safeguards to provisioning; and modules, which are re-usable components that take into account best practices and opinionated definitions of resources. AWS Partner Network (APN), third parties, and the developer community contribute these extensions to the Public Registry. Using extensions, customers no longer need to create and maintain custom provisioning logic for resource types from third-party vendors.
Over last few months, AWS collaborated with partners to develop and publish over 80 new resources across 14 providers to Public Registry for CloudFormation. Below is a summary of the new resource type additions.
Recently Updated Third-Party Providers
| Provider | Use case |
| MongoDB Atlas | Manage components in MongoDB Atlas. Add, edit, or delete administrative objects within Atlas, including projects, users, and database deployments |
| GitLab | Manage the users and groups in an organization, set up a new project with the right users, groups, and access token, tag a project automatically for every active CI/CD deployment |
| New Relic | Create a new Dashboard with custom Pages, Widgets and Layout, add tags to your data to help improve data organization and findability, workloads-related tasks |
| GitHub | Manage the users and groups in an organization, set up a new project with the right users, groups, and access token, Add a webhook to a repo |
| Dynatrace | Set up a new project with service level objective, locations, monitors and metrics |
| Okta | Onboard a new application into Okta with the right users and groups |
| PagerDuty | Set up monitoring of a new or existing application |
| Databricks | Set up a Databricks cluster and jobs |
| Fastly | Configure Fastly as a CDN for your web app |
| BigID | Connect S3 and DynamoDB data sources into your BigID application |
| Rollbar | Set up a new Rollbar project and manage rules, teams, and users |
| Cloudflare | Configure a DNS record and load-balancing using Cloudflare |
| Lacework | Configure Lacework alert profiles, rules, channels and manage queries |
| Snowflake | Create databases, users, and manage privileges |
Key Benefits
Here are some of the benefits for extension builders and consumers when publishing extensions to the public registry:
- Discoverability – Publishing your extensions in the public registry will make them discoverable by 1M+ active CloudFormation and CDK customers.
- CDK Support – We’re seeing rapid growth in the adoption of the CDK amongst the developer population. Upon publishing to the registry, L1 CDK Constructs will automatically be created for your third party resources making them compatible with the CDK with no added work required. These constructs will also be listed on Construct Hub and aids discoverability discoverable by customers.
- Drift detection – Third-party resource types in the public registry also integrate with drift detection. After creating a resource from a third-party resource type, CloudFormation will detect changes to the third-party resource from its template configuration, known as configuration drift, just as it would with AWS resources.
- AWS Config – You can also use AWS Config to manage compliance for third-party resources consumed from the registry. The resource types are automatically tracked as Configuration Items when you have configured AWS Config to record them, and used CloudFormation to create, update, and delete them. Whether the resource types you use are third-party or AWS resources, you can view configuration history for them, in addition to being able to write AWS Config rules to verify configuration best practices.
- Abstraction of Best Practices with Modules – Browse and use modules from the registry when creating your CloudFormation templates to ensure you’re provisioning resources while adhering to best practices.
- AWS Cloud Control API – The AWS Cloud Control API allows AWS partners and customers to interface with your resource type through API calls using Create, Read, Update, Delete, and List (CRUD-L) operations. Resources in the registry will be automatically integrated with our AWS Cloud Control API and expands your third party resource compatibility to even more AWS services and IaC tools.
We’ve seen great momentum from our partners and developer community over the past year. We are looking forward to continued investment and innovation in the Public Registry.
How to Get Started
For Resource Type Users: Explore and Activate Third Party Resource Types
Third party resource types must first be activated before they can be used. You do this by logging into your AWS Console > Navigate to CloudFormation > Registry > Public extensions > Set the Publisher to Third Party. This will show you a list of available third-party resources in your region (note that different regions may have a different set of third-party resource types). Select the radio box next to the resource types you want to activate and click the activate button at the top of the list.
Figure 1:
Don’t see the extension you need in the registry?
You can submit requests for new third-party extensions through our Community Registry Extensions Github repo issue tracker! Click the New Issue button and describe the third-party extension along with information about your use case.
For Developers and Publishers: Join the CloudFormation Developer Community and Start Building
You can see several of the community-built registry extensions in the AWS CloudFormation Community Registry Extensions repository and even contribute yourself. You can also read about the experiences and lessons learned from publishing to the Registry through this blog written by Cloudsoft.
For developers looking to create new resource types to add to the public Registry, follow this creating resource types walkthrough help you get started. If you need assistance creating, publishing resources, or just want to join the discussion, you can join the conversation today in our CloudFormation Discord Channel. We’d love to hear about your experiences and use cases in developing innovations with registry extensions.
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