Author: Elliot Yamaguchi

The following post is by guest blogger Julien Lépine, Solutions Architect at AWS. He explains how to optimize templates so that AWS CloudFormation quickly deploys your environments. ______________________________________________________________________________________ Customers sometimes ask me if there’s a way to optimize large AWS CloudFormation templates, which can take several minutes to deploy a stack. Often stack creation is […]

AWS CloudFormation Designer (Designer) is a graphic tool for creating, viewing, and modifying AWS CloudFormation templates. With Designer, you can construct templates by adding resources using a drag-and-drop interface, and then edit resource details by using the integrated JSON editor. A Designer URL is a web link that you can share with anyone that has […]

When you use AWS CloudFormation templates to deliver your solutions, your users can get up and running with just a few clicks or commands. Users can launch an AWS CloudFormation stack with one of your templates, and AWS CloudFormation automatically provisions the specified resources and bootstraps the software running on them. Although users have several […]

When you provision an Amazon EC2 instance in an AWS CloudFormation stack, you might specify additional actions to configure the instance, such as install software packages or bootstrap applications. Normally, CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation after the instance has been successfully created. However, you can use a CreationPolicy so that CloudFormation proceeds with stack creation […]

With cost allocation tagging and the AWS Cost Explorer, you can see the cost of operating each of your AWS CloudFormation stacks. Here’s how it works.  AWS CloudFormation automatically tags each stack resource. For example, if you have a stack that creates an Amazon EC2 instance, AWS CloudFormation automatically tags the instance with the following […]

When you create AWS CloudFormation templates, you might find that you’re continually describing the same set of resources in different templates. However, instead of repeatedly adding them to each of your templates, consider using nested stacks. What are Nested Stacks With nested stacks, you can link to a template from within any other template. You […]

When you delete a stack, by default AWS CloudFormation deletes all stack resources so that you aren’t left with any strays. This also means any data that you have stored in your stack are also deleted (unless you take manual snapshots).  For example, data stored in Amazon EC2 volumes or Amazon RDS database instances are […]