Provisioning with AWS CloudFormation

Components

The provisioning of AWS resources with AWS CloudFormation involves several major components as follows:

Template – a blueprint for building your AWS resources, used to create, update or delete a CloudFormation stack (see below)
Stack – an instantiated collection of related AWS resources, as defined by the stack's CloudFormation template (see above)

Alternative deployment workflows via CloudFormation

CloudFormation can also be used to provision most deployment components used by other services supported by Tasks for AWS, instead of using the respective built in dedicated tasks - refer to the Alternative workflow via CloudFormation section within the following overviews for details:

On this page:

Related Pages:

Workflow

The provisioning workflow is illustrated by the diagram in How Does AWS CloudFormation Work?:

This comprises the following activities:

design a template – this can be done manually via any JSON capable text editor, or with the AWS CloudFormation Designer
(optional) upload the template to an Amazon S3 bucket – see the Upload File(s) action of the Amazon S3 Object task
create a stack from the template – see the Create Stack action of the AWS CloudFormation Stack task
(optional) update the stack (with or without changes to the template)
1. Directly – see the Update Stack action of the AWS CloudFormation Stack task
2. Via change sets – see the Create Stack Change Set and Execute Stack Change Set actions of the AWS CloudFormation Stack task

Provisioning with AWS CloudFormation

Components

Workflow

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)