Management and Governance
CoreAWS CloudFormation
Infrastructure as code service that provisions and updates AWS resources from declarative templates and stack operations.
Key points
- The template is the source of truth for managed resources.
- A stack update evaluates and applies declared changes; inspect change and resource events.
- Manual edits can create drift and make later deployments unreliable.
Best-known use cases
- Create repeatable development and test stacks.
- Update existing application resources through reviewed IaC.
What candidates often confuse it with
- CloudFormation deploys declarative templates; AWS CDK synthesizes CloudFormation from code.
- AWS SAM extends CloudFormation with serverless-focused resources and transformations.
Key takeaway
Update CloudFormation-managed resources through the versioned template and stack workflow.
Related services
- AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)
- AWS Lambda
- AWS CodePipeline
Relevant exam tasks
- D3.2 — Test applications in development environments
- 3.2.4 — Deploy application stack updates to existing environments (for example, deploying an AWS SAM template to a different staging environment)
- D3.3 — Automate deployment testing
- 3.3.4 — Implement and deploy infrastructure as code (IaC) templates (for example, AWS SAM templates, AWS CloudFormation templates)
- D3.4 — Deploy code by using AWS Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) services
- 3.4.3 — Update existing IaC templates (for example, AWS SAM templates, CloudFormation templates)