Intro

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC) - version control, easy replication
• Supports most AWS services
• Declarative programming
• Free, pay for the underlying resources
• CloudFormation stacks are isolated from each other
• Deleting a stack deletes every single resource or artifact created by that stack.

Templates

• Templates are uploaded and referenced from S3. To update a template, we cannot edit the previous version. We need re-upload a new version of the template and CloudFormation will find out what needs to be modified to reach the desired state.
• Deploying Templates
  • Manual - editing templates in the CloudFormation Designer (GUI)
  • Automated - editing templates in a YAML file and using CLI to deploy the templates (recommended for automation)

Resources

• Mandatory field
• Resource types are of the form AWS::aws-product-name::data-type-name
• Template contents are static (no dynamic code generation allowed)

Parameters

• Dynamic input variables in CloudFormation templates. When deploying the template, the user will be asked to enter values for the defined parameters.
• Parameters can be referenced using !Ref