Your primary goal for deployments includes minimizing the overall time and effort required for it, while having predictability, flexibility, and visibility for each of the steps required to install and run your cloud applications. AWS CloudFormation provides an easy way to create and manage the AWS resources for your application. In addition, CloudFormation allows you to do all this in a declarative and parametrized manner while managing all of the dependencies for you.
It is important that you use CloudFormation right from the beginning even if your initial configuration is simple enough to be provisioned and managed using the console. Also ensure that all subsequent changes to your stacks flow through CloudFormation as well, in order to avoid unpredictable results. If you need to make a change from outside of CloudFormation...
