Posted On: Aug 12, 2013
We are excited to announce two significant CloudFormation enhancements: 1) parallel stack creation, update, and deletion, and 2) nested stack updates. AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion by using custom or predefined templates.
Parallel Stack Creation, Update and Deletion
CloudFormation now creates, updates and deletes resources in parallel in order to improve performance of these operations. For example, provisioning a RAID 0 setup, which involves the creation of multiple EBS volumes, is now faster because CloudFormation can provision the volumes in parallel. CloudFormation automatically determines which resources in a template can be created in parallel. CloudFormation template authors can use the DependsOn attribute for control over the order of resource creation.
Nested Stack Updates
CloudFormation allows nesting a stack as a resource inside a template. This feature has enabled design and creation of related stacks together. Today, we are introducing the ability to update a top-level stack and its nested stacks together. Nested stack updates can be triggered by running the UpdateStack command on a top-level stack, or by selecting the top-level stack and clicking the ‘Update Stack’ button in the CloudFormation Management Console. CloudFormation will detect the updates made to the top-level template as well as the nested templates and update only those stacks whose templates have changed. Before introduction of this feature, users had to update each nested stack separately.
To learn more about CloudFormation, visit the CloudFormation detail page, documentation, and watch this introductory video. Our large collection of sample templates makes it easy to try our service within minutes.