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CloudFormation provisioning with Harness

This topic describes how to use AWS CloudFormation to provision infrastructure as part of your deployment process.

Harness can provision any resource that is supported by CloudFormation.

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Looking for How-tos? See CloudFormation How-tos.

CloudFormation provisioning options​

You can use Harness with CloudFormation in two ways:

  • Dynamic infrastructure provisioning: you can provision the target infrastructure for a deployment as part of the stage's Environment settings, and then deploy to that provisioned infrastructure in the same stage.
  • Ad hoc provisioning: provision any resources other than the target infrastructure for the deployment.

You can do both in the same stage if you want.

For details on these provisioning options, go to Provisioning overview.

CloudFormation dynamic infrastructure provisioning summary​

Dynamic provisioning uses your CloudFormation templates to provision the target deployment infrastructure for the current pipeline stage.

Dynamic provisioning with CloudFormation is supported for most Harness integrations. The steps required for each integration are covered in their documentation.

For more information, go to Provision target deployment infrastructure dynamically with CloudFormation.

Limitations​

Infrastructure provisioning is limited to specific infrastructure settings for the target environment.

For example, the platform-agnostic Kubernetes infrastructure (Direct) requires that you have an existing cluster, so you cannot provision a new cluster. But it does let you provision a namespace.

CloudFormation rollback​

When rollback happens, Harness rolls back the provisioned infrastructure/resources to the previous successful version of the CloudFormation stack.

Harness won't increment the serial in the state, but perform a hard rollback to the exact version of the state provided.

Harness determines what to rollback using the Provision Identifier entered in the CloudFormation Rollback step.

If you've made these settings using Harness expressions, Harness uses the values it obtains at runtime when it evaluates the expression.

See Rollback Provisioned Infra with the CloudFormation Rollback Step.