AWS CloudFormation Sample Templates

About the Sample Templates

The AWS CloudFormation samples package contains a collection of templates that illustrate various usage cases. Stacks can be created from the templates via the AWS Management Console, through the AWS CloudFormation command line tools or via the AWS CloudFormation APIs. To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, visit the AWS CloudFormation detail page or the Getting Started Guide.

You can use the template as-is or you can use them as a starting point for creating your own templates.

What's New?

• 11/12/2012 : Added Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region templates
• 06/11/2012 : Added examples for spot instances and EC2 roles/instance profiles
• 04/25/2012 : Added examples showing how to create a VPC configuration; Added Windows examples for creating Active Directory and Server Roles on Windows Server 2008 R2
• 04/09/2012 : Added samples showing how to add and remove resources during stack update and how to set up SNS and SQS for publication
• 03/20/2012 : Added Elastic Beanstalk PHP example and examples of using cfn-init with private, authenticated S3 buckets for files and sources.
• 02/02/2012 : Added VPC sample templates: Amazon EC2 Instance and EIP, Elastic Load Balancer and Auto Scaling, Amazon RDS DB instances plus Wordpress installed into an existing VPC.
• 12/14/2011 : Added South America (Sao Paulo) Region templates
• 12/05/2011 : Added Amazon ElastiCache sample template
• 11/08/2011 : Added US West (Oregon) Region templates
• 11/08/2011 : Added Reworked the end-to-end application templates to use application bootstrapping scripts rather than custom EC2 AMIs.
• 09/29/2011 : Added samples for Amazon Identity and Access Management plus templates for Application bootstrapping.
• 08/08/2011 : Added samples for embedded templates and Auto Scaling policies and notifications.
• 07/11/2011 : Added samples for Amazon RDS for Oracle, Weighted Round Robin DNS plus Elastic Load Balancing zone apex and security group support.
• 05/31/2011 : Support parameter validation, delete policies, mutually referencing security groups and untargeted Amazon EC2 launches with Amazon EBS volumes"
• 05/03/2011 : Support Amazon S3 buckets, External EIPs and WaitConditions. Added Sample Ruby application using Cloud-init.
• 04/11/2011 : Support Amazon Route 53 and Amazon CloudFront
• 03/02/2011 : Added Asia Pacific (Tokyo) Region templates
• 02/24/2011 : Initial version

Getting Started

Download the ZIP file and unpack it into a directory on your hard drive.

AWS Management Console

• Log into the AWS Management Console.
• Click on the "AWS CloudFormation" tab.
• Click the "Create Stack" button.
• Fill in a name for your stack.
• Select "Upload a Template File".
• Browse to your template and select it.
• Press "Continue" and follow the instructions on the screen.

AWS CloudFormation Command Line Tools

• Download the AWS CloudFormation command line tools from here
• Use the cfn-validate-template command with the --template-file option to validate the template and list the template parameters
• Use the cfn-create-stack command with the --template-file option to create a stack. If the stack requires parameter values to be filled in, you will need to also specify the --parameters option.

Using the Templates directly from Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)

All of the sample templates are also available directly from S3. You can use the S3 URL of a template directly from the command line tool using the --template-url option. To view the templates that are stored in S3, click on the following links:

• US East (Virginia) region
• US West (Oregon) region
• US West (N. California) region
• EU West (Ireland) region
• Asia Pacific (Singapore) region
• Asia Pacific (Tokyo) region
• Asia Pacific (Sydney) region
• South America (Sao Paulo) Region

Note: You must reference a template in an S3 bucket in the same region in which you are creating the stack. Each of the sample templates is available in every region.