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)
  • Change Set – a summary of proposed changes to AWS resources provisioned by the CloudFormation stack (see above)


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:



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Workflow

The provisioning workflow are illustrated by the diagrams in How Does AWS CloudFormation Work?:

Provisioning without change sets

This comprises the following activities:

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

Provisioning with change sets

This comprises the following activities:

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

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)