Technical Musings: 'Compressing' CloudFormation template to get around size limit

Tuesday, January 6, 2015

'Compressing' CloudFormation template to get around size limit

Recently I hit the 51,200 byte body size limit of AWS's CloudFormation's templates.  I looked into creating Nested Stacks, but that seemed like a pain.  Looking at the created json template, I saw a lot of unneeded whitespace.

I used troposhere to generate the template, so it was easy to reduce the size by stripping out the beginning and ending whitespace of each line in the json file.

I just added the following line:
json_compressed="\n".join([line.strip() for line in t.to_json().split("\n")])
utils.validate_cloudformation_template(json_compressed)

This more than havled the size of the template from ~60K to ~25K bytes:

$ wc template.json
    1821    2860   60133 template.json

$ wc template_compressed.json
    1821    2860   24616 template_compressed.json


And CloudFormation accepted it, no problem.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Troposphere's to_json method passes its arguments through to python's json encoder so you can say `t.to_json(indent=None)` to get a compact representation of the JSON to avoid having to modify the string afterwards.