Amazon Web Services Pet Peeves

CloudFormation.md

Tagging

• Can't have tags for the CloudFormation stack itself (needs to always use scripts)
• Add global template tags, which will be set on each taggable resource (i.e. company name, etc.)
• No tags on ElastiCache, CloudFront Distribution and maybe others

Mappings

• Mappings should allow arbitrary levels (currently fixed to just 2)
• A mapping should be able to nest another mapping (via something like { "Mapping" : "..." })
• Add JMESPath queries for mappings (via something like { "Fn::Query" : [ "MappingName", "JMESPath" ] })

Inconsistencies

• DeletionPolicy cannot be an { "Fn::If" : [ ... ] }
• In Amazon RDS Security Group Rule it's CIDRIP, and elsewhere it's CidrIp
• Several properties differ between Launch Configuration and EC2 Instance

Misc

• Needs immutable parameters that are set and referenced within the template, but not exposed to the user to change in the Console
• The limit of only 60 parameters per template is too low
• Outputs should be made available as quickly as their dependent values become available, not just at the end if the stack is launched successfully
• The data type of Boolean and Number is lost (all primitives get converted to a String) in embedded JSON files
• Fn::Select should allow for nested arrays (an array for indexes)
• Update Stack should have a dry run capability explaining the changes and their order
• Macros - often resources differ slightly; there should be a way to define a parametrized macro/template
• Instead of supporting templates hosted only on S3, templates (and nested stacks) should allow for any URL allowing templates parameters to be passed as a JSON POST or in the query string
• A new function Fn::Format should produce a dynamic string based on parameters as using Fn::Join is not unreadable and possibly a Jinja2 template