# Amazon CloudFormation Documentation

Amazon CloudFormation enables you to create and provision Amazon infrastructure deployments predictably and repeatedly. It helps you leverage Amazon products such as Amazon EC2, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon SNS, Elastic Load Balancing, and Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications in the cloud without worrying about creating and configuring the underlying Amazon infrastructure. Amazon CloudFormation enables you to use a template file to create and delete a collection of resources together as a single unit (a stack).

- [User Guide](/en_us/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/): Describes key concepts for Amazon CloudFormation and provides instructions for getting started. CloudFormation helps you model and set up Amazon resources by treating infrastructure as code.
- [/en_us/AWSCloudFormation/latest/TemplateReference/](/en_us/AWSCloudFormation/latest/TemplateReference/)
- [API Reference](/en_us/AWSCloudFormation/latest/APIReference/): Describes all the API operations for CloudFormation in detail. Also provides sample requests, responses, and errors for the supported web services protocols.
- [Guard User Guide](/en_us/cfn-guard/latest/ug/): Provides a conceptual overview of the Guard open-source policy-as-code evaluation tool. Includes walkthroughs for writing and testing policy rules and validating data against those rules.
- [/en_us/cloudformation-cli/latest/userguide/](/en_us/cloudformation-cli/latest/userguide/)

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