AWS CloudFormation overview

AWS CloudFormation allows developers and businesses to create a collection of related AWS and third-party resources and manage them in an orderly and predictable fashion. Imagine being able to design and deploy a virtual network, complete with a variety of interrelated resources, just by writing a script. This is the power of CloudFormation, where it turns architecture into science.

At the heart of CloudFormation is the template – a JSON- or YAML-formatted text file that describes all the resources you need (such as EC2 instances, RDS database instances, VPCs, and so on) and their configuration settings. It is exactly like a blueprint for your AWS environment. These templates can be used to duplicate environments in minutes, which simplifies the process of setting up new infrastructure or replicating existing infrastructure for testing and development purposes.

What really sets CloudFormation apart is its ability to handle dependencies and sequencing...