Example CloudFormation Template

Previously, we’ve explored the anatomy of CloudFormation, and we can now explore how to create and work with a CloudFormation template in this lesson.

Creating CloudFormation templates

There are multiple ways to create a CloudFormation template for provisioning resources and creating a stack, as follows:

• We can manually create a CloudFormation template by writing the code ourselves. This approach allows fine-grained control over resource definitions and configurations.

• We can also reuse and modify existing CloudFormation templates to suit specific requirements.

• We can visually create, view, and modify templates through a web-based visual interface tool provided by AWS called the CloudFormation Designer. Another AWS service, the Application Composer service, is also an excellent tool that provides a visual design experience for generating templates.

• We can also import existing AWS resources on the CloudFormation console to automatically generate a template, allowing us to create a stack based on the imported resources.

Sample template

Let’s see an example of a template that creates a simple S3 bucket.

We first begin by creating our CloudFormation template by providing the valid template format version at the start of it: