Posted On: Feb 5, 2024

AWS CloudFormation launches a new feature that makes it easy to generate AWS CloudFormation templates and AWS CDK apps for existing AWS resources that are managed outside CloudFormation. You can use the generated templates and apps to import resources into CloudFormation and CDK or replicate resources in a new AWS Region or account. With this launch, you can onboard workloads to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in minutes, eliminating weeks of manual effort. You can then leverage the IaC benefits of automation, safety, and scalability for the workloads. 

Today, you have to create a template by looking up CloudFormation documentation and the live values of resource properties to import resources into CloudFormation. Now, you can generate templates for over 500 AWS resource types by searching for and selecting resources in your AWS account. Further, you get recommendations for related resources based on the resources that you select, such as the bucket policies for selected S3 buckets. You can then import selected resources into CloudFormation, download the template for deployment, or generate a CDK CLI command that converts the template into a CDK app in your preferred programming language, such as TypeScript or Python. You can run the CLI command on a host where CDK is installed.

To get started, open the AWS CloudFormation Console and select IaC generator in the navigation panel. You can also use IaC generator from the AWS CLI and AWS SDK. Learn more:

IaC generator is available in AWS Regions where CloudFormation is available. Refer to the AWS Region table to learn more.