Best practices

To use IaC and EDP together in a way that's compatible, secure, and mutually beneficial, we recommend that you follow these best practices:

• Avoid making API calls directly on a resource – Use the CloudFormation update-stack API call as part of an EDP approach, and make sure that only CloudFormation makes changes to the EBS volume. To ensure a successful update operation, the volume size must be valid and must not be lower than the value of the resources currently provisioned. The volume size could be a parameter in the CloudFormation stack.

• Avoid using a single, monolithic template – Break your template into modular templates (similar to microservices). Modular templates are easier to update, maintain, and troubleshoot.

• Use a feedback mechanism for EDP – Design feedback mechanisms that are tailored to your organization's needs. In the previous hypothetical scenario, a feedback mechanism could be an auto-generated pull request to the version control system coupled with a solution to tag system events and metadata.

• Create notification systems – Notification systems can help notify the team when a certain event takes place. For example, you can create an email-based notification by using Amazon SNS. Finally, it's a best practice to always ensure that stacks are in sync and that your DevOps system is designed with guardrails that can help you avoid resource drift. For more information, see Set up CloudFormation drift detection in a multi-Region, multiaccount organization in the AWS Prescriptive Guidance documentation.