What is AWS CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure as code (IaC) service that allows you to model and provision AWS resources using templates. You can define resources in JSON or YAML format and CloudFormation automatically provisions them in the correct order with proper dependencies. It supports resource updates, rollback on failures, and stack management across multiple AWS accounts and regions. CloudFormation templates are reusable and version-controllable, enabling consistent infrastructure deployment. It provides drift detection to identify resource changes and supports nested stacks for modular template design. CloudFormation integrates with other AWS services and supports custom resources via Lambda.