Introduction

This article will focus on the most important aspects and capabilities that makes AWS Cloudformation not only a vital tool but a important step into a good best practices and methodologies to implement your project in AWS.

What is AWS Cloudformation?

AWS Cloudformation (CF) can de defined as a service that helps you to model and set up the different AWS resources required, but the most important aspect is that providing the capability to manage and provision them is better known as infrastructure as code ( IaC) , then by extension by using CF you're taking benefit of the advantages of that methodology, but, first of all, let's define what exactly is IaC and what are they main benefits.

Infrastructure as code ( IaC)

IaC is the process of managing and provisioning computer data centers through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

Benefits of IaC

• Faster speed and consistency: As you eliminate several manual processes and you're integrating in different files(code) your resources configuration.
• Efficient Software development lifecycle: IaC gives the opportunity to allow developers to focus more on application development.
• Reduce management overhead: Is the common advantage when something is completely or partially automated, there are several less resources or permissions to configure for example.

Cloudformation Use Cases

Those are some of the benefits and real useful scenarios of using AWS Cloudformation:

• Simplify infrastructure management
• Quickly replicate your infrastructure
• Easily control and track changes to your infrastructure