Is there a way to let CloudFormer (beta) keep user data in launch configuration - amazon-web-services

Question

I tried out CloudFormer(beta), the AWS tool that generates a CloudFormation template from selected existing infrastructure. CloudFormer is run as a separate stack, which creates an instance. You create the stack using the CloudFormer template and then log in on that instance using credentials you filled in when creating the stack. As described in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/cfn-using-cloudformer.html.
This all worked smoothly. I got into the CloudFormer wizard and was able to easily click through and select all my resources, which consisted of a VPC, with an autoscaling group that runs a simple web app that's connected to S3, RDS and DynamoDB. The excercise is based on Ryan Lewis' excellent Pluralsight course for AWS (source code). When I ran the resulting CloudFormation template, I ran into just one issue: I had to change single occurence of AWS::RDS::DBSecurityGroup to AWS::EC2::SecurityGroup, because the former doesn't seem to be accepted. Then my stack was created successfully.
However, the app was not running. A quick inspection showed that the user data was missing from the launch configuration. So it seems that CloudFormer just skips that when creating the template for the launch config. That's slightly strange to me, as the user data is what makes launch configs useful. Did you experience the same issue and is there maybe a workaround?
For completeness sake, here is the relevant part of the CloudFormation template that was generated:
"lcpizzalauncherdyn4": {
"Type": "AWS::AutoScaling::LaunchConfiguration",
"Properties": {
"AssociatePublicIpAddress": true,
"ImageId": "ami-0661a53fb3b1e117a",
"InstanceType": "t2.micro",
"KeyName": "pizza-keys",
"IamInstanceProfile": "pizza-ec2-role",
"SecurityGroups": [
{
"Ref": "sgpizzaec2sg"
}
],
"BlockDeviceMappings": [
{
"DeviceName": "/dev/xvda",
"Ebs": {
"SnapshotId": "snap-0cad60faa1e33e22b",
"VolumeSize": 8
}
}
]
}
},
See the full file on gitHub
Seems sad if the CloudFormer tool is not usable for creating a fully working template because of a little omission like this. Now I do get that it is a beta, so I tried finding a place to report an issue. Do you know what is the preferred way to let the AWS team know?

Answer 1

CloudFormer has been in beta since 2011. It does not appear to have been maintained much lately, so it might be deprecated in future.
So, it looks like you'll need to add the User Data section manually.