Question

What is AWS CloudFormation and how do you use it?

Answer 1

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for you to describe and provision all the infrastructure resources in your cloud environment. CloudFormation allows you to use a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for your applications.

Example of a simple CloudFormation template (YAML):

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: '2010-09-09'
Resources:
  MyS3Bucket:
    Type: 'AWS::S3::Bucket'
    Properties:
      BucketName: my-bucket

Deploying a CloudFormation stack using AWS CLI:

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name my-stack --template-body file://template.yaml