Cloudformation is a powerful tool for building large, coordinated clusters of AWS resources. It has a sophisticated API, capable of supporting many different enterprise use-cases and scaling to thousands of stacks and resources. However, there is a downside: the JSON interface for specifying a stack can be cumbersome to manipulate, especially as your organization grows and code reuse becomes more necessary.

To address this and other concerns, Bazaarvoice engineers have built cloudformation-ruby-dsl, which turns your static Cloudformation JSON into dynamic, refactorable Ruby code.

https://github.com/bazaarvoice/cloudformation-ruby-dsl

The DSL closely mimics the structure of the underlying API, but with enough syntactic sugar to make building Cloudformation stacks less painful.

We use cloudformation-ruby-dsl in many projects across Bazaarvoice. Now that it’s proven its value, and gained some degree of maturity, we are releasing it to the larger world as open source, under the Apache 2.0 license. It is still an earlier stage project, and may undergo some further refactoring prior to it’s v1.0 release, but we don’t anticipate major API changes. Please download it, try it out, and let us know what you think (in comments below, or as issues or pull request on Github).

A big thanks to Shawn Smith, Dave Barcelo, Morgan Fletcher, Csongor Gyuricza, Igor Polishchuk, Nathaniel Eliot, Jona Fenocchi, and Tony Cui, for all their contributions to the code base.