The OpenStack Heat component complies to the following two standards:
Amazon CloudFormation
TOSCA
AWS CloudFormation is an orchestration service introduced by Amazon, which enables users to define the cloud resources in a file called template. These resources are provisioned and configured by the provisioning engine automatically. All the dependencies are automatically solved by the provisioning engine itself.
The following are a few features offered by CloudFormation:
A CloudFormation template simplifies infrastructure management by defining all the resources and their relationships into a single template file, and then building a stack using this template file. It reduces the time and effort required to install and then configure each service manually. This enables both the automated and unattended installation of services.