AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion. AWS GovCloud (US) is an isolated AWS region designed to allow US government agencies and customers to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements. The AWS CloudFormation samples templates on this page illustrate various use cases in AWS GovCloud (US) region. In AWS GovCloud (US) region, stacks can be created from the templates via the AWS Management Console, AWS CLI, the AWS CloudFormation APIs or the AWS Toolkits. You can use the templates as-is or you can use them as a starting point for creating your own templates.

AWS CloudFormation is available in all AWS regions. For more details click here.

Template URL
Description
Launch in AWS GovCloud (US) Region
Windows_Single_Server_SharePoint_Foundation.template SharePoint® Foundation 2010 running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 Launch Stack
Windows_Single_Server_Active_Directory.template Create a single server installation of Active Directory running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2. Launch Stack
Windows_Roles_And_Features.template

Create a single server specifying server roles running on Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2.

* Microsoft, Windows Server, and SharePoint are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

Launch Stack
RDS_VPC.template Example of creating an Amazon RDS database instance in a VPC using VPC security groups. Launch Stack
ELB_and_AutoScaling_in_VPC.template Example of creating an Elastic Load Balancer and an Auto Scaling Group in a VPC. Launch Stack
EC2InstanceWithSecurityGroupSample.template Simple EC2 instance with a security group. Launch Stack
EC2_Instance_With_Block_Device_Mapping.template Example of creating an EC2 instance with Block Device Mappings. Launch Stack
EC2_Instance_With_Ephemeral_Drives.template Example of creating an EC2 instance using Ephemeral storage devices. Launch Stack
multi-tier-web-app-in-vpc.template Create a multi-tier web application in a VPC with multiple subnets. The first subnet is public and contains and internet facing load balancer, a NAT device for internet access from the private subnet and a bastion host to allow SSH access to the hosts in the private subnet. The second subnet is private and contains a Frontend fleet of EC2 instances, an internal load balancer and a Backend fleet of EC2 instances. Launch Stack
IAM_Users_Groups_and_Policies.template Example of creating IAM users, groups and policies. Launch Stack
  • Log into the Management Console in the AWS GovCloud (US) Region.
  • Click on the "AWS CloudFormation" tab.
  • Click the "Create Stack" button.
  • Fill in a name for your stack.
  • Click on "Provide a Template URL" and fill in the URL of the sample you want to use.
  • Press "Continue" and follow the instructions on the screen.
  • Install the AWS Command Line Interface (CLI) from here.
  • Use the CloudFormation commands documented here.

AWS Toolkit for Microsoft Visual Studio and AWS Toolkit for Eclipse provide a graphical user interface for creating and managing CloudFormation stacks as well as editing CloudFormation templates. The sample templates from this page can be downloaded and used through the AWS Toolkits.

CloudFormer is a prototype tool that enables you to create AWS CloudFormation templates from the existing AWS resources in your account. You can provision and configure your application resources the way you want using your existing processes and tools. Once everything is setup and you have the resources provisioned, simply take a "snapshot" of the configuration using CloudFormer to create a template, enabling you to launch copies of the application with AWS CloudFormation. The CloudFormer tool is packaged as a standalone application that you can launch inside your AWS environment. The application is started on a t1.micro Amazon EC2 instance via AWS CloudFormation. No other AWS resources are required to run CloudFormer.

To launch CloudFormer in the AWS GovCloud (US) region, run the following AWS CLI CloudFormation command:

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name --template-url https://s3-us-gov-west-1.amazonaws.com/cloudformation-templates-us-gov-west-1/AWSCloudFormer.template --capabilities "CAPABILITY_IAM"

After the CloudFormer stack is created, navigate to the CloudFormer UI using the URL provided in the stack output. Select 'AWS GovCloud (US)' region in the CloudFormer UI to begin using CloudFormer.


You must reference a template in an S3 bucket in the same region in which you are creating the stack. Each sample template is available in every AWS Region. You can use the same template files from each region from the following pages:

Note: CloudFormation sample templates are AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement and may only be used in connection with AWS CloudFormation.

Note: CloudFormation sample templates are AWS Content under the AWS Customer Agreement and may only be used in connection with AWS CloudFormation.