Application deployments in traditional environments used to take days, and if the deployment required procurement of infrastructure then the deployment cycle would extend to weeks and sometimes even months. With cloud applications, the infrastructure is available on-demand and deployment time is reduced to minutes. In large enterprises, the average number of deployments across their application portfolio now runs into a couple of hundred per day. In order to achieve smooth and error-free deployments with zero downtime, it is imperative to plan, design, and implement a highly-automated DevOps pipeline.

The following figure illustrates a DevOps pipeline incorporating code repositories, a continuous integration environment, AWS CloudFormation, and application environments:

CloudFormation is a key part of your DevOps pipeline, enabling faster production releases. For example, as shown in the figure, you can set up a continuous integration environment that builds your application, packages the application code and CloudFormation templates, and then uses CloudFormation templates to create the stack and deploy your application (in various environments including the final promotion to production).