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CloudFormation Resources

What are resources?

  • Resources are the core of your CloudFormation template (mandatory)
  • They represent the different AWS Components that will be created and configured

  • Resources are declared and can reference each other

  • AWS figures out creation, updates and deletes of resources for us

  • There are over 224 types of resources
  • Resource types identifiers are of the form:
    • AWS::aws-product-name::data-type-name

How do I find resources documentation?

  • All the resources can be found in https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-template-resource-type-ref.html
  • An EC2 instance example is here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-properties-ec2-instance.html

FAQ for resources

  • Can I create dynamic amount of resources?
    • No, you can't. Everything in CloudFormation template has to be declared. You can't perform code generation there.
  • Is every AWS Service supported?
    • Almost. Only a few select few niches are not there yet.
    • You can work around that usin AWS Lambda Custom Resources