AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) service that allows developers to model and provision AWS resources using declarative templates in JSON or YAML format. It automates the creation, updating, and deletion of AWS infrastructure stacks in a repeatable and predictable manner. This enables consistent environment setups across development, testing, and production.
Developers should learn AWS CloudFormation when managing complex or frequently changing AWS environments, as it reduces manual errors and ensures infrastructure consistency. It is particularly useful for DevOps teams implementing continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, disaster recovery setups, and multi-region deployments. Use cases include automating the provisioning of EC2 instances, VPCs, and RDS databases as part of application stacks.