Welcome - Amazon CloudFormation
Services or capabilities described in Amazon Web Services documentation might vary by Region. To see the differences applicable to the China Regions, see Getting Started with Amazon Web Services in China (PDF).

Welcome

Amazon CloudFormation allows you to create and manage Amazon infrastructure deployments predictably and repeatedly. You can use Amazon CloudFormation to leverage Amazon products, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Notification Service, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications without creating or configuring the underlying Amazon infrastructure.

With Amazon CloudFormation, you declare all your resources and dependencies in a template file. The template defines a collection of resources as a single unit called a stack. Amazon CloudFormation creates and deletes all member resources of the stack together and manages all dependencies between the resources for you.

For more information about Amazon CloudFormation, see the Amazon CloudFormation product page.

Amazon CloudFormation makes use of other Amazon products. If you need additional technical information about a specific Amazon product, you can find the product's technical documentation at docs.aws.amazon.com.

Stack actions

When you use Amazon CloudFormation, you manage related resources as a single unit called a stack. You create, update, and delete a collection of resources by creating, updating, and deleting stacks. All the resources in a stack are defined by the stack's template.

CancelUpdateStack | ContinueUpdateRollback | CreateStack | DeleteStack | DescribeStacks | ListStacks | UpdateStack

Stack events: DescribeStackEvents

Stack resources: DescribeStackResource | DescribeStackResources | ListStackResources

Stack drift: DescribeStackDriftDetectionStatus | DescribeStackResourceDrifts | DetectStackDrift | DetectStackResourceDrift

Stack operations: ListExports | ListImports | UpdateTerminationProtection

Stack policies: GetStackPolicy | SetStackPolicy

Templates: EstimateTemplateCost | GetTemplate | GetTemplateSummary | ValidateTemplate

Change set actions

If you need to make changes to the running resources in a stack, you update the stack. Before making changes to your resources, you can generate a change set, which is summary of your proposed changes. Change sets allow you to see how your changes might impact your running resources, especially for critical resources, before implementing them.

CreateChangeSet | DeleteChangeSet | DescribeChangeSet | ExecuteChangeSet | ListChangeSets

Stack sets actions

Amazon CloudFormation StackSets lets you create a collection, or stack set, of stacks that can automatically and safely provision a common set of Amazon resources across multiple Amazon Web Services accounts and multiple Amazon Web Services Regions from a single Amazon CloudFormation template. When you create a stack set, Amazon CloudFormation provisions a stack in each of the specified accounts and Amazon Web Services Regions by using the supplied Amazon CloudFormation template and parameters. Stack sets let you manage a common set of Amazon resources in a selection of accounts and Amazon Web Services Regions in a single operation.

CreateStackSet | DeleteStackSet | DescribeStackSet | ListStackSets | UpdateStackSet

Stack instances: CreateStackInstances | DeleteStackInstances | DescribeStackInstance | ListStackInstances

Stack set operations: DescribeStackSetOperation | ListStackSetOperations | ListStackSetOperationResults | StopStackSetOperation

Extension management actions

The Amazon CloudFormation registry enables you to manage the extensions, both private and public, that are available for use in your account.

ActivateType | DeactivateType | DescribeType | ListTypes

Registration: DescribeTypeRegistration | DeregisterType | ListTypeRegistrations | RegisterType

Configuration: BatchDescribeTypeConfigurations | SetTypeConfiguration

Versioning: ListTypeVersions | SetTypeDefaultVersion

Extension publication actions

Use the Amazon CloudFormation operation to develop and publish your own public third-party extensions.

For more information, see Publishing extensions to make them available for public use in the CFN-CLI User Guide for Extension Development.

PublishType | TestType

Publishers: DescribePublisher | RegisterPublisher

This document was last published on May 29, 2023.