CloudFormation introduces a new way to manage services and their configurations. Through the creation of JSON or YAML files, CloudFormation lets you describe exactly the AWS architecture you would like to build. Once your files are created, you can simply upload your files to CloudFormation, which will execute them and automatically create or update your AWS resources.

Most AWS managed tools and services are supported. You can get the full list at http://amzn.to/1Odslix. In this chapter, we will only look at the infrastructure we have built so far, but we will add more resources in the next chapters.

After a brief overview of how CloudFormation is structured, we will create a minimalist stack to recreate the Hello World web application from Chapter 2, Deploying Your First Web Application. After that, we will see two more options to create CloudFormation templates: the designer, which lets you visually edit your template in a web graphical user interface (GUI), and CloudFormer, a tool to generate templates from existing infrastructure.