NOTE – A new version of the AWS CloudFormation User Guide is available at This is official Amazon Web Services (AWS) documentation for AWS CloudFormation. This documentation is offered for free here as a Kindle book, or you can read it online or in PDF format at This user guide provides you with an overview of AWS CloudFormation and shows you how to use CloudFormation templates and stacks. This guide also includes the template reference and the CLI reference. AWS CloudFormation is a service that gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources.