Amazon AWS Launches CloudFormation

Today the Amazon AWS team launched a tool to simplify the provisioning and deployment of AWS resources using templates, AWS CloudFormation. The tool is available at no additional charge to AWS customers. In addition Amazon is providing sample templates for developers and system administrators.

AWS CloudFormation is available via the AWS Management Console, command line tools and the APIs. The provided templates have been constructed with best practices in mind for availability, scalability and operational triggers.

Out of Box Templates available:

• WordPress
• TextPattern
• MoinMoin
• Tracks
• Gollum
• Drupal
• ReviewBoard
• Movable Type
• MantisBT
• Hibari
• Joomla
• Insoshi
• Redmine 

The idea for AWS CloudFormation came to us while we were building our own applications on top of AWS services. Rather than repeatedly building the same infrastructure and manually managing the dependencies between resources each time, our developer teams started creating templates to seamlessly handle the provisioning. We found this to be so useful that we decided to offer it up to our customers, said Adam Selipsky, Vice President, Amazon Web Services. AWS CloudFormation allows developers and businesses to focus on their applications while leaving the provisioning details to AWS.

While the provided templates are very task specific, most developers should be able to use them as models for building business solutions.  CloudFormation supports most AWS resources and is available today.