Create Amazon EC2 resources using AWS CloudFormation

Amazon EC2 is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your AWS resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes the AWS resources that you need (such as instances and subnets), and AWS CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.

When you use AWS CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your Amazon EC2 resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple AWS accounts and Regions.

Amazon EC2 and AWS CloudFormation templates

To provision and configure resources for Amazon EC2 and related services, you must understand AWS CloudFormation templates. Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources you'll provision in your AWS CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use AWS CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with AWS CloudFormation templates. For more information, see What is AWS CloudFormation Designer? in the AWS CloudFormation User Guide.

Resources for Amazon EC2

Learn more about AWS CloudFormation

To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, see the following resources: