Working with CloudFormation Templates

Before provisioning and configuring any AWS cloud resources, we must first understand and learn to work with CloudFormation templates. A CloudFomration template contains all the key instructions to deploy an AWS infrastructure’s resources using CloudFormation.

In this lesson, we’ll explore the basic aspects of a CloudFormation template and how to create a new one or reuse and adapt an existing one according to our needs.

Anatomy of a CloudFormation template

CloudFormation uses templates to define the AWS resources that we want to create and configure. Templates are written in a declarative language, with supported JSON and YAML. All resources that we want to provision and the order in which we want to provision them are essentially declared in a CloudFormation template.

Templates can be version-controlled, just like any other code, making it easier to roll back any changes in case of deployment failure without compromising the entire infrastructure.