AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives you an easy way to model a collection of related AWS and third-party resources, provision them quickly and consistently, and manage them throughout their lifecycles, by treating infrastructure as code. A CloudFormation template describes your desired resources and their dependencies so you can launch and configure them together as a stack. You can use a template to create, update, and delete an entire stack as a single unit, as often as you need to, instead of managing resources individually. You can manage and provision stacks across multiple AWS accounts and AWS Regions.

Introduction to AWS CloudFormation (3:01)

Benefits

Automate best practices

With CloudFormation, you can apply DevOps and GitOps best practices using widely adopted processes such as starting with a git repository and deploying through a CI/CD pipeline. You can also simplify auditing changes and trigger automated deployments with pipeline integrations such as GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline.

Scale your infrastructure worldwide

Manage resource scaling by sharing CloudFormation templates to be used across your organization, to meet safety, compliance, and configuration standards across all AWS accounts and regions. Templates and parameters enable easy scaling so you can share best practices and company policies. Additionally, CloudFormation StackSets enables you to create, update, or delete stacks across multiple AWS accounts and Regions, with a single operation.

Integrate with other AWS services

To further automate resource management across your organization, you can integrate CloudFormation with other AWS services, including AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) for access control, AWS Config for compliance, and AWS Service Catalog for turnkey application distribution and additional governance controls. Integrations with CodePipeline and other builder tools let you implement the latest DevOps best practices and improve automation, testing, and controls.

Manage third-party and private resources

Model, provision, and manage third-party application resources (such as monitoring, team productivity, incident management, CI/CD, and version control applications) alongside your AWS resources. Use the open source CloudFormation CLI to build your own CloudFormation resource providers – native AWS types published as open source.

Extend CloudFormation with the community

The AWS CloudFormation GitHub organization offers open source projects that extend CloudFormation’s capabilities. The CloudFormation Registry and CloudFormation CLI let you define and create resource providers to automate the creation of resources safely and systematically. Using CloudFormation GitHub projects, you can do things like check CloudFormation templates for policy compliance (using cfn-guard), or validate use of best practices (using cfn-lint).

How it works

Featured customers

Deloitte’s ConvergeHEALTH Miner solution is a suite of tools and services that help accelerate data gathering, analysis, and management across the healthcare research lifecycle... Miner leverages a wide range of AWS services. They used AWS CloudFormation and AWS Service Catalog to get Miner to clients faster using infrastructure as code. Deloitte chose AWS CloudFormation templates to code the infrastructure, which it can then deploy in one click using AWS Service Catalog.

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All of the company’s networks are designed, built, and maintained through AWS CloudFormation templates. “This gives us the luxury of version-controlling our network, and it allows for seamless, exact network duplication for on-demand development and staging environments,” says Witoff.

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