CloudFormation - Key Benefits

1. Infrastructure as Code

• No manual resource creation – ensures consistency and repeatability.

• All changes are made via code and can be reviewed through version control.

2. Cost Management

• Resources in a stack are tagged for easy cost tracking.

• Templates can be used to estimate costs before deployment.

• Cost-saving example: In dev environments, automate stack deletion after hours and recreate when needed.

3. Productivity

• Quickly destroy and recreate infrastructure.

• Automatically generates visual diagrams of templates.

• Declarative – no need to manually determine provisioning order.

4. Don’t Re-invent the Wheel

• Reuse existing templates from AWS documentation or community sources.

5. Resource Coverage

• Supports almost all AWS services.

• For unsupported services, use Custom Resources to integrate external provisioning logic.