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Deploying a Website Canary with CloudFormation

In this live AWS environment, you will use AWS CloudFormation to deploy your own website Canary application. Website canaries are programs commonly used to monitor the status of sites or services to determine uptime, calculate availability and alert when there are potential failures. Because you will deploy the canary with CloudFormation, you will avoid much of the manual setup that would otherwise be required, and you will be able to describe your AWS infrastructure for this application in a JSON template.

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Labs

Path Info

Level
Clock icon Intermediate
Duration
Clock icon 30m
Last updated
Clock icon Aug 22, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Upload a Lambda Function Zip File Deployment Artifact to S3

    Upload a deployment zip package to S3 inside the AWS console so that your CloudFormation template can rely on it during the creation process.

    1. Navigate to the S3 portion of the console
    • Create a bucket with a globally unique name (try your name, favorite animal and some random letters)
    • Copy the bucket name down for later
    • Upload the canary.zip file from the GitHub repository here into the S3 bucket
  2. Challenge

    Create a CloudFormation Stack

    Create a CloudFormation stack in the AWS console using the designer and the code samples provided.

    1. Navigate to the CloudFormation part of the AWS Console
    • Create a new template using the designer
    • Make sure to select the template section of the editor
    • Paste in the code from the sample cftemplate.json file here
    • Update the CF template with the name of the bucket you created
    • Update the CF template with the name of the website you'd like to check
    • Update the CF template with the phone number you want to get a text notification at
    • Validate the CF template
    • Upload and deploy the CF template
    • Test the Lambda Function

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