Do you remember the days when we deployed applications by uploading files via FTP? Those days are over (hopefully), but fully automated deployments via a continuous deployment pipeline are still considered black magic by many.

Amazon's CloudFormation service provides a way to automate the deployment of not only of applications, but of a complete cloud infrastructure. We can express the infrastructure we need in a YAML or JSON file, and let CloudFormation do the work of provisioning everything we need. 

In this article, we'll deploy a virtual private cloud and place a Docker image of an example application into it, all without having any previous AWS knowledge.

This article is a sample chapter of the book "Stratospheric" that I'm currently working on. In the book, we'll eventually use CDK (Cloud Development Kit) to deploy our applications, but it builds on CloudFormation, so it's good to know the basics).

Recently, I listened to Tim Ferriss interviewing Daniel Ek, the CEO of Spotify. In the interview, Daniel said something that stuck to my mind:

"Some of the most creative people that I know are actually incredibly almost scripted in their creativity, in their approach, in their process, and how they approach their creativity."

You would think that the most creative people are totally unpredictable, walking through the (home) office, doing this and that, and waiting for inspiration to hit them. 

But a daily script - a routine, a system of habits - actually supports creativity. If you do a bit every day, at some point, you will have something great. 99 days you may have no result. But the result of the 100th day will have been worth it. 

Just make sure that you're in control of that script. Otherwise, it won't make you happy.