# Creating X-Ray resources with Amazon CloudFormation
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Amazon X-Ray is integrated with Amazon CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your Amazon resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes all the Amazon resources that you want, and Amazon CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you. 

When you use Amazon CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your X-Ray resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple Amazon Web Services accounts and Regions. 

## X-Ray and Amazon CloudFormation templates
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To provision and configure resources for X-Ray and related services, you must understand [Amazon CloudFormation templates](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-guide.html). Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources that you want to provision in your Amazon CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use Amazon CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with Amazon CloudFormation templates. For more information, see [What is Amazon CloudFormation Designer?](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/working-with-templates-cfn-designer.html) in the *Amazon CloudFormation User Guide*.

X-Ray supports creating [https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-group.html](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-group.html), [https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-samplingrule.html](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-samplingrule.html), and [https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-resourcepolicy.html](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-resource-xray-resourcepolicy.html) resources in Amazon CloudFormation. For more information, including examples of JSON and YAML templates, see the [X-Ray resource type reference](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/AWS_XRay.html) in the *Amazon CloudFormation User Guide*.

## Learn more about Amazon CloudFormation
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To learn more about Amazon CloudFormation, see the following resources:
+ [Amazon CloudFormation](https://www.amazonaws.cn/cloudformation/)
+ [Amazon CloudFormation User Guide](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/Welcome.html)
+ [Amazon CloudFormation API Reference](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/AWSCloudFormation/latest/APIReference/Welcome.html)
+ [Amazon CloudFormation Command Line Interface User Guide](https://docs.amazonaws.cn/cloudformation-cli/latest/userguide/what-is-cloudformation-cli.html)