Working with Amazon CloudFormation templates and stacks in Application Manager
Application Manager, a capability of Amazon Systems Manager, helps you provision and manage resources for your applications by integrating with Amazon CloudFormation. You can create, edit, and delete Amazon CloudFormation templates and stacks in Application Manager. A stack is a collection of Amazon resources that you can manage as a single unit. This means you can create, update, or delete a collection of Amazon resources by using CloudFormation stacks. A template is a formatted text file in JSON or YAML that specifies the resources you want to provision in your stacks.
Application Manager also includes a template library where you can clone, create, and store templates. Application Manager and CloudFormation display the same information about the current status of a stack. Templates and template updates are stored in Systems Manager until you provision the stack, at which time the changes are also displayed in CloudFormation.
After you create a stack in Application Manager, the CloudFormation stacks page displays helpful information about it. This includes the template used to create it, a count of OpsItems for resources in your stack, the stack status, and drift status.
About Cost Explorer
Application Manager is integrated with Amazon Cost Explorer, a feature of Amazon Cost Management, through the Cost widget. After you enable Cost Explorer in the Cost Management console, the Cost widget in Application Manager shows cost data for a specific non-container application or application component. You can use filters in the widget to view cost data according to different time periods, granularities, and cost types in either a bar or line chart.
You can enable this feature by choosing the Go to Amazon Cost Management console button. By default, the data is filtered to the past three months. For a non-container application, if you choose the View all button, Application Manager opens the Resources tab. For container applications, the View all button opens the Amazon Cost Explorer console.
Note
Cost Explorer uses tags to track your application costs. If your Amazon CloudFormation stack-based
application isn't configured with the AppManagerCFNStackKey tag
key, Cost Explorer fails to present accurate cost data in Application Manager. When the
AppManagerCFNStackKey tag key is not detected, you will be
prompted in the console to add the tag to your CloudFormation stack to enable
cost tracking. Adding it maps the tag key to the Amazon Resource Name (ARN) of
your stack and enables the Cost widget to display accurate
cost data.
Important
Adding the AppManagerCFNStackKey tag will trigger a stack update.
Any manual configurations that were performed after the stack was originally
deployed will not be reflected after the user tag is added. For more information
about resource update behaviors, see Update behaviors of stack resources in the
Amazon CloudFormation User Guide
Before you begin
Use the following links to learn about CloudFormation concepts before you create, edit, or delete CloudFormation templates and stacks by using Application Manager.