Cloud Computing Intermediate

What is CloudFormation?

An AWS service that provisions and manages cloud resources using declarative JSON or YAML templates.

CloudFormation templates define AWS resources (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, VPC, etc.) and their configurations. A template creates a "stack" — a collection of resources managed as a single unit. Changes to templates trigger stack updates with dependency-aware ordering.

Features include change sets (preview changes), rollback on failure, drift detection, nested stacks, and cross-stack references. CloudFormation is AWS-specific; Terraform provides similar functionality across multiple cloud providers.

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Related Terms

AWS (Amazon Web Services)

The world's largest cloud computing platform, offering hundreds of services for compute, storage, networking, and more.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

Google's suite of cloud computing services running on the same infrastructure that Google uses for its consumer products.

Lambda Function (Cloud)

An AWS serverless compute service that runs code in response to events without provisioning or managing servers.

A distributed computing paradigm that processes data near the source of generation rather than in a centralized cloud data center.

Cloud Load Balancer

A managed service that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple servers to ensure high availability and optimal resource utilization.

Kubernetes Namespace

A virtual cluster within a Kubernetes cluster that provides scope for names and enables resource isolation between teams or environments.

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