In Chapter 1, AWS Fundamentals, you were given a basic introduction to AWS CloudFormation fundamentals. What you learned is definitely enough to get you started with the basic administration of your account but, as you start to tackle more challenging projects, you will want to learn a few advanced techniques. In this chapter, you will follow recipes that will allow you to customize the behavior of CloudFormation, and apply your templates across multiple regions and accounts.

In this chapter, we will introduce some advanced techniques, which you can use to take your CloudFormation skills to the next level. The following topics will be covered:

• Creating and populating an S3 bucket with custom resources
• Using a macro to create an S3 bucket for CloudTrail logs
• Using mappings to specify regional AMI IDs
• Using StackSets to deploy resources to multiple regions
• Detecting resource drift from templates with drift detection