Background

By using an AWS CloudFormation template, you can automate creating secrets for database or service resources in your AWS cloud infrastructure. You can use AWS CloudFormation to automate the creation of your cloud infrastructure. If you do not specify a user name, IAM determines the user name implicitly based on the AWS access key ID signing the request. This operation works for access keys under the AWS account. Consequently, you can use this operation to manage AWS account root user credentials. This is true even if the AWS account has no associated users.

AWS CloudFormation is a wonderful service for automating your AWS builds – my colleagues have done a number of detailed walk-throughs in other blog posts.

1. Apr 10, 2020 You can delete a service account key using the Cloud Console, the gcloud tool, the serviceAccount.keys.delete method, or one of the client libraries. If you delete a key, your application will no longer be able to access Cloud Platform resources using that key. A security best practice is to rotate your service account keys regularly.
2. You can create templates for the service or application architectures you want and have AWS CloudFormation use those templates for quick and reliable provisioning of the services or applications (called “stacks”). You can also easily update or replicate the stacks as needed.

AWS also provides a toolkit for Visual Studio as an extension of the IDE. To get started, configure the extension with your AWS IAM Access Key ID and Secret Key and you will be able to use the new AWS explorer pane to explore all AWS services such as VPC, EC2, RDS, etc.

By installing the toolkit, it also automatically installed the AWS .NET SDK which included libraries to develop apps using AWS services using .NET classes. With the AWS SDK support on the .NET platform, building applications and infrastructure leveraging AWS services using .NET easier.

Create and deploy your CloudFormation template in Visual Studio

To create a new CloudFormation template in Visual Studio, you simply add a new project: select AWS — File — New — Project. Navigate to Templates — AWS and select AWS CloudFormation Project.

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Once the project is created, you will be presented with the goodness of Visual Studio including Intellisense! Open ssl generate cert and key.

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To deploy the template, right click the template and select Deploy to AWS CloudFormation

Troubleshooting notes

I came across an error whenever I deployed a new AWS CloudFormation template created in Visual Studio (I am using Visual Studio 2012 Premium edition). The error indicated a syntax error; and after validating my template – it is clear that it is not a formatting error.

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Deploying the sametemplate directly on the AWS console or via an AWS Powershell command (test-cfntemplate) rendered the same result:

Finding the solution took some searching, until I found a post indicating that this is caused by the default encoding used by Visual Studio: UTF-8 with BOM (Byte-Order-Mark). Changing the default to UTF-8 without BOM fixed the issue. This can be changed by selecting File — Advanced Save Options in Visual Studio.