With Amazon CloudFormation, you can provision anything ranging from a simple EC2 instance to a multi-region, multi-tier application quickly and easily with a simple text file.  This file in turn becomes the “Source of Truth” for your cloud infrastructure.

You create templates for automatic configurations of CloudFormation Stacks for stress-free provisioning of related AWS resources.  Bring “orderly” and “predictable” back into resource deployment!

You can automate resource management, manage your infrastructure worldwide, and model, provision, and manage AWS and third party resources through code.

Infrastructure as Code

This service allows you to realize the concept of “Infrastructure as Code” (IaC). As the name suggests, you are able to create and maintain your IT infrastructure using code. The template can be in JSON or YAML, and you can update or manage the Stack at any time using AWS Management Console, Command Line, or SDK.

There is version control so that you can manage different iterations of the templates like you would your code in Github.

CloudFormation is Free!

There is no additional charge for this service.  You only pay for the resources that are used in the Stacks (for example, EC2 instances that were spun up).

Resources

• AWS CloudFormation (AWS)