Working with stacks

A stack is a collection of Amazon resources that you can manage as a single unit. In other words, you can create, update, or delete a collection of resources by creating, updating, or deleting stacks. All the resources in a stack are defined by the stack's Amazon CloudFormation template. A stack, for instance, can include all the resources required to run a web application, such as a web server, a database, and networking rules. If you no longer require that web application, you can simply delete the stack, and all of its related resources are deleted.

Amazon CloudFormation ensures all stack resources are created or deleted as appropriate. Because Amazon CloudFormation treats the stack resources as a single unit, they must all be created or deleted successfully for the stack to be created or deleted. If a resource can't be created, Amazon CloudFormation rolls the stack back and automatically deletes any resources that were created. If a resource can't be deleted, any remaining resources are retained until the stack can be successfully deleted.

You can manage stacks by using the Amazon CloudFormation console, API, Amazon CLI or Systems Manager Application Manager.