CloudFormation Stacks
Write a CloudFormation template in YAML that creates a VPC and EC2 instance, deploy it as a stack with the CLI, update it through a change set, detect drift, and practice the full stack lifecycle including rollback.
Prerequisites: An AWS account, AWS CLI v2 configured, basic YAML familiarity.
AWS CloudFormation is AWS's native infrastructure-as-code service. Like Terraform, it deploys and manages infrastructure from a declarative template — but CloudFormation is fully native to AWS (no provider to install, no state file to manage), integrated with IAM, and supports over 1,000 AWS resource types directly. The state is managed by CloudFormation on your behalf.
The key CloudFormation mental model: a stack is a running deployment of a template. You manage the template, CloudFormation manages the stack. Templates can be YAML or JSON; YAML is more readable and supports comments. The only required section of a template is Resources.
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