What is AWS CloudFormation? Key Concepts & Tutorial

AWS CloudFormation is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool developed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) to model, provision, and manage resources on the AWS cloud. It can manage both AWS resources and third-party ones. As a native IaC tool for AWS, it integrates deeply with the AWS ecosystem, which means all changes, features, and new services are added immediately after they are released on AWS. The service allows users to fully control the IaC approach and is not the only IaC tool in the DevOps landscape; its main competitor is Terraform. Spacelift can also manage AWS CloudFormation, enforcing best practices, including change sets.