AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work. CloudFormation takes care of this for you. Once deployed, you can modify and update the AWS resources in a controlled and predictable way allowing you to version control your AWS infrastructure in the same way as you version control your software.

You can deploy and update a template and its associated collection of resources (called a stack) via the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation command line tools or APIs. CloudFormation is available at no additional charge, and you pay only for the AWS resources needed to run your applications.