What It Is
- CloudFormation is a declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) service that lets you define AWS resources in a template and have AWS provision them automatically.
- Templates specify what you want, not how to create it.
- CloudFormation takes care of ordering, dependencies, and orchestration.
Example Template could define:
- A Security Group
- Two EC2 instances using that Security Group
- An S3 bucket
- An ELB in front of the instances
CloudFormation provisions everything in the right order with the exact configuration specified.