Chapter 6: Configuration Management of the EC2 Instances Using cfn-init

1. The cfn-init helper script processes these configuration sections in the following order: packages, groups, users, sources, files, commands, and then services. Yes, and it is recommended to do so for complex configurations or to run configuration items in a different order.
2. No.
3. Not using the files directive in the config set. You will have to use the commands directive, but it is possible to add a missing directory to the full path of the file, and cfn-init will automatically create it (similar to the mkdir -p command).
4. WaitCondition is a CloudFormation resource that is used to make CloudFormation wait for resource completion. For example, you can use WaitCondition with cfn-signal to make CloudFormation inform the users about resource creation only when cfn-init has finished running.