CloudFormation

March 28, 2025

Cloud Formation is a declarative way of outlining yours AWS infrastructure, for any resources ( most of them are supported)
For example, within a CloudFormation template, you say:
- I want a security group
- I want two EC2 instances using this security group
- I want an S3 bucket
- I want a load balancer (ELB) in front of these machines
Then CloudFormation creates those for you, int he right order, with the exact configuration that you specify

Each resources within the stack is tagged with an identifier so you can easily see how much a stack cost you
You can estimate the costs of your resources using the Cloud Formation template
Savings strategy: In Dev, you could automation deletion of templates at 5 PM and recreated at 8 AM, safely
Productivity
- Ability to destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly
- Automated generation of Diagram for you templates!
- Declarative programming (no need to figure out ordering and orchestration)
Don't re-invent the wheel
- Leverage existing templates on the web!
- Leverage the documentation
Supports (almost) all AWS resources:
- Everything we'll see in this course is supported
- You can use "custom resources" for resources that are not supported