Now that we have taken a look at Elastic Beanstalk, we have seen that we can instruct AWS to create complete environments in an automated manner. But what if Elastic Beanstalk is not enough? What can we do when we need to create a custom application in AWS that's delivered in an automated manner? In these kinds of situations, we can use CloudFormation—a cloud orchestration tool that can create resources from a specification document.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

• Introduction to CloudFormation
• CloudFormation basic elements
• How CloudFormation works
• Creating an EC2 instance using template (code example)