AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to model and provision AWS and third party application resources in your cloud environment. AWS CloudFormation allows you to use programming languages or a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications across all regions and accounts. This gives you a single source of truth for your AWS and third party resources.

Amazon Web Services Cloudformation is a great way to centralize your infrastructure into templates, which enables you to keep it in version control, share it, monitor it, and deploy it in different environments without risking differences in configuration between runs. It ties nicely with most other AWS services and offers. Not all services are added at launch, which creates a bit of a separation between what can be done and what can not be done, also the syntax is a bit limited, but it only comes to play for large projects. It does tie you down to AWS only, there's no multi cloud support.

Model it all

AWS CloudFormation allows you to model your entire infrastructure and application resources with either a text file or programming languages. The AWS CloudFormation Registry and CLI make it easy to manage third party resources with CloudFormation. This provides a single source of truth for all your resources and helps you to standardize infrastructure components used across your organization, enabling configuration compliance and faster troubleshooting.

Automate & deploy

AWS CloudFormation provisions your application resources in a safe, repeatable manner, allowing you to build and rebuild your infrastructure and applications, without having to perform manual actions or write custom scripts. CloudFormation takes care of determining the right operations to perform when managing your stack, orchestrating them in the most efficient way, and rolls back changes automatically if errors are detected.

It's just code

Codifying your infrastructure allows you to treat your infrastructure as just code. You can author it with any code editor, check it into a version control system, and review the files with team members before deploying into production.

Extensibility

Using the AWS CloudFormation Registry, you can model, provision, and manage third party application resources alongside AWS resources with AWS CloudFormation. Examples of third party resources are monitoring, team productivity, incident management, and version control tools.

You can build your own resource providers using the AWS CloudFormation CLI, which is an open source tool that streamlines the development process and includes local testing and code generation capabilities.

Authoring with JSON/YAML

AWS CloudFormation allows you to model your entire infrastructure in a text file. You can use JSON or YAML to describe what AWS resources you want to create and configure. If you want to design visually, you can use AWS CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with AWS CloudFormation templates.

Authoring with familiar programming languages

With the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) you can define your application using TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET. AWS CDK is an open source software development framework that helps you model your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages, and then provision your infrastructure using AWS CloudFormation directly from your IDE. CDK provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert. To learn more about AWS CDK please visit the homepage.

Safety controls

AWS CloudFormation automates the provisioning and updating of your infrastructure in a safe and controlled manner. There are no manual steps or controls that can lead to errors. You can use Rollback Triggers to specify the CloudWatch alarm that CloudFormation should monitor during the stack creation and update process. If any of the alarms are breached, CloudFormation rolls back the entire stack operation to a previous deployed state.

Preview changes to your environment

AWS CloudFormation Change Sets allow you to preview how proposed changes to a stack might impact your running resources. For example, whether your changes will delete or replace any critical resources. AWS CloudFormation makes the changes to your stack only after you decide to execute the Change Set.

Dependency management

AWS CloudFormation automatically manages dependencies between your resources during stack management actions. You do not need to worry about specifying the order in which resource are created, updated, or deleted. CloudFormation determines the correct sequence of actions to use for each resource when performing stack operations.

Cross account & cross-region management

AWS StackSets that lets you provision a common set of AWS resources across multiple accounts and regions with a single CloudFormation template. StackSets takes care of automatically and safely provisioning, updating, or deleting stacks in multiple accounts and across multiple regions. This provides the same level of automation, repeatability, and reliability to stack management operations across regions and accounts.