AWS provides various ways to deploy resources on the AWS Cloud. In the previous chapter, we learnt about AWS Elastic Beanstalk as a service to deploy your resources and applications. CloudFormation is another service provided by AWS to deploy your resources. In this chapter, we will learn about the various components of CloudFormation and how to make use of it to define and launch your AWS resources.
In this chapter, we will discuss CloudFormation, template anatomy, intrinsic functions, cross stack references, nested stack, validating a template, submitting a template to AWS CloudFormation, and creating EC2 instance using CloudFormation. In addition, we will touch upon helper script and stack policies.