You want to provision a AWS CloudFormation StackSet so that you can create, update, or delete stacks across multiple accounts and regions with a single operation.
Prerequisites
This requires an IAM role which (only) the CloudFormation service can assume. It should already be in place, refer to How to grant cross-account AWS access for CloudFormation StackSets if this is not the case anymore.
Step-by-step guide
A stack set is based on a regular AWS CloudFormation template, but requires a few more and slightly different steps than provisioning a standalone stack (notably there is no equivalent to the convenient 'Launch stack' URL feature yet). In order to get acquainted with the process, we recommend to create a test CloudFormation stack set from our cloudformation-stackset-skeleton.yaml template:
Go to the CloudFormation StackSets console and click 'Create StackSet'
Select 'Specify an Amazon S3 template URL', specify the URL of our cloudformation-stackset-skeleton.yaml, and click 'Next'
Specify a name (say 'cross-account-skeleton'), keep the example parameters for now, and click 'Next'
Specify one ore more of your organization's AWS account IDs as a comma separated list, select at least two 'Available regions' (say 'US East - N.Virginia' and 'EU West - Ireland') and click 'Add', then click 'Next'
The 'Deployment options' default to the most conservative 'one by one' deployment for starters - once confident that the template provisions correctly, more aggressive settings can speed up the process.
Skip the 'Options' by clicking 'Next', review the settings and click 'Create'.
- The resulting progress monitoring screen is similar to the regular CloudFormation one and also updated automatically, just not as quickly and slightly less intuitive, so a bit of patience is required here.
(Optional) Assuming the stack set has been successfully created across multiple regions and accounts, select 'Manage StackSet' and play around by creating/deleting stack instances in particular regions or accounts, or by overriding parameters for selected stack instances.