Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, has launched AWS CloudFormation, an offering that allows developers and businesses to create collections of related AWS resources and provide them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
The AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates allow users to create their own templates to describe the AWS resources required to run their apps, and manage the sequencing or interdependencies of those resources.
The company said that the AWS CloudFormation is available at no additional charge and users pay only for the AWS resources required to run their applications.
In addition, customers can use AWS CloudFormation templates to create identical copies of the same AWS infrastructure stack that will run over and over as needed, removing the need for developers to manually recreate an application’s stack for each deployment.
The offering enables users to create CloudFormation templates and deploy the associated resource stacks via the AWS Management Console, CloudFormation command line tools or APIs.
Further, the AWS CloudFormation can be used across multiple AWS Availability Zones to configure an array of AWS resources including Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancers, AWS Elastic Beanstalk environments, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) instances and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS) topics.
Amazon Web Services vice-president Adam Selipsky said the idea for AWS CloudFormation came to them while they were building their own applications on top of AWS services.
"Rather than repeatedly building the same infrastructure and manually managing the dependencies between resources each time, our developer teams started creating templates to seamlessly handle the provisioning," Selipsky said.
"We found this to be so useful that we decided to offer it up to our customers and AWS CloudFormation allows developers and businesses to focus on their applications while leaving the provisioning details to AWS."
