Amazon aims to simplify private cloud creation with CloudFormation

Amazon Web Services has added the creation of private clouds to its portfolio with its CloudFormation service.

Organisations can now automatically create private clouds using templates from its CloudFormation service. The move is seen as a bid to make its cloud computing offering more attractive to enterprises concerned about putting resources onto its cloud.

Users will be able to create and populate a complete virtual private network using a single template, according to Amazon.

While creating a virtual private cloud has been possible on AWS for a couple of years, this is the first time that users have had access to a simplified way of doing this without having to figure out the order in which AWS services be provisioned or knowing how to make the dependencies between the services work.

"CloudFormation templates are JSON formatted text files and can be stored in a source control system alongside your application source code. CloudFormation allows you to separate the network and VPC configuration from the resources needed to run an application," the company posted on a blog.

"For example, a network administrator can define the Virtual Private Cloud resources in a template and ensure that the subnets, route tables, network ACLs, and gateways are correctly set up. After testing the configuration, the network administrator can check the template into the central source control system."

The company added that resources including Amazon EC2 instances, auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers and Amazon RDS Database instances can be implemented on an Amazon VPC using the CloudFormation templates.

Using the CloudFormation tools or virtual private cloud incurs no addtional cost,  however organisations that create a hardware VPN connection to their VPC using a VPN gateway, are charged an extra $0.05 per hour it is provisioned and available, according to Amazon.