CloudFormation is a deployment tool that helps to provision your infrastructure using AWS resources such as EC2, IAM, RDS, Route 53, S3, and so on by creating a template to code your infrastructure in it so that you can deploy your infrastructure repeatedly. An AWS CloudFormation template is a text file and its format is the JSON standard and all the resources in the template are a single unit called stack. For example, imagine that you need to design and integrate a typical 3-tier web system with VPC, EC2, EBS, RDS, Route53, and ELB to deploy a system through the AWS management console or using AWS CLI. It will take several steps and probably a couple of hours at least, to finish your operation. If you code your infrastructure and create a CloudFormation template, you can deploy the infrastructure repeatedly and delete it as well.

In Chapter 2, Hosting a Static Website on Amazon S3 Bucket, we manually configured a static website on the S3 bucket through the S3 management console...