Management & Governance

AWS CloudFormation

Infrastructure as code using YAML/JSON templates.

Overview

CloudFormation provisions and manages stacks of AWS resources from declarative templates, with change sets, drift detection and StackSets for multi-account.

When to use it

Reproducible environments
Multi-account/region rollouts
Compliance via versioned IaC

Setup

Author template.yml.
Deploy: `aws cloudformation deploy --template-file template.yml --stack-name qa-env`.
Use Change Sets to preview updates.

How to use

Detect drift

aws cloudformation detect-stack-drift --stack-name qa-env

QA use cases

Spin up a complete QA environment per branch and tear it down at end of day to save cost.