Working with CloudFormation templates

To deploy a stack of resources using CloudFormation, you must first create a stack template. The template describes the resources that you want to provision in your CloudFormation stack. The two template formats are JSON and YAML. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use AWS Application Composer, which provides a drag-and-drop interface for building templates in the console. For more information, see Application Composer.

The following topics show you how to use the different parts of a CloudFormation template and how they work together. You'll also learn how to use custom resources and macros to add functionality to templates and how to create modules that you can share and reuse across multiple templates. You'll also find example snippets for common resource types and configurations. These can be copied and customized to speed up template development.