What Is CloudFormation?

The AWS CloudFormation service is essentially a tool that AWS provides for dealing with the infrastructure as code on the cloud.

Before we further delve into the world of CloudFormation, let’s first explore the concept of infrastructure as code and how the CloudFormation service fits into it.

What is infrastructure as code?

Infrastructure as code is the practice of defining code instructions for creating and managing different cloud resources instead of relying on manual practices. This helps maintain a highly secure, manageable, and scalable infrastructure. It simplifies the deployment of infrastructure resources, reduces human error, and ensures that infrastructure configurations are consistent and compliant according to the standards of an organization.

The AWS CloudFormation service is AWS’s solution for dealing with the infrastructure on the AWS Cloud as code. With AWS CloudFormation, we can spend less time creating or managing our AWS resources and focus more on the applications that run on them.

Introduction to AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation is an automated AWS service that allows us to provision and manage a collection of resources, also called a stack, on the AWS Cloud using code. Almost all of the AWS resources can be created and managed on the cloud.

We can define AWS resources for their stacks by declaring them in code files called templates. We can provide this template to CloudFormation, which in turn deploys these cloud resources. This avoids the need to create each resource individually using the AWS console or API themselves.

Here’s a list of key CloudFormation terminologies that we need to know:

• Templates: CloudFormation templates ...