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 CloudFormation to leverage Amazon products, such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, Amazon Elastic Block Store, Amazon Simple Notification Service, ELB, and Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling to build highly reliable, highly scalable, cost-effective applications without creating or configuring the underlying Amazon infrastructure.

With 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. CloudFormation creates and deletes all member resources of the stack together and manages all dependencies between the resources for you.

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

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 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 | RollbackStack | UpdateStack

Stack events: DescribeStackEvents

Stack resources: DescribeStackResource | DescribeStackResources | ListStackResources

Stack drift: DescribeStackDriftDetectionStatus | DescribeStackResourceDrifts | DetectStackDrift | DetectStackResourceDrift

Stack operations: ListExports | ListImports | SignalResource | UpdateTerminationProtection

Stack policies: GetStackPolicy | SetStackPolicy

Templates: 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 | DescribeChangeSetHooks | ExecuteChangeSet | ListChangeSets

StackSets actions

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 CloudFormation template. When you create a StackSet, CloudFormation provisions a stack in each of the specified accounts and Amazon Web Services Regions by using the supplied 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

StackSet operations: DescribeStackSetOperation | ListStackSetOperations | ListStackSetOperationResults | StopStackSetOperation

IaC Generator actions

Use CloudFormation IaC generator to scan your existing Amazon resources and generate CloudFormation templates from them.

For more information, see Generating templates from existing resources in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

Generated templates: CreateGeneratedTemplate | DeleteGeneratedTemplate | DescribeGeneratedTemplate | GetGeneratedTemplate | ListGeneratedTemplates | UpdateGeneratedTemplate

Resource scanning: DescribeResourceScan | ListResourceScans | ListResourceScanRelatedResources | ListResourceScanResources | StartResourceScan

Stack refactoring actions

Use CloudFormation stack refactoring to move resources between stacks or reorganize your stack architecture.

For more information, see Refactoring stacks in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

CreateStackRefactor | DescribeStackRefactor | ExecuteStackRefactor | ListStackRefactors | ListStackRefactorActions

CloudFormation registry actions

The CloudFormation registry serves as a centralized hub for managing extensions that can be used with CloudFormation templates, including CloudFormation Hooks, resource types, and modules.

For more information, see Managing extensions with the CloudFormation registry in the Amazon CloudFormation User Guide.

Discover and activate: ActivateType | DeactivateType | DescribeType | ListTypes

Configure: BatchDescribeTypeConfigurations | SetTypeConfiguration

Manage versions: ListTypeVersions | SetTypeDefaultVersion

Monitor results: GetHookResult | ListHookResults

Register privately: DescribeTypeRegistration | DeregisterType | ListTypeRegistrations | RegisterType

Publish: DescribePublisher | PublishType | RegisterPublisher | TestType

This document was last published on November 21, 2025.