AWS CloudFormation automates cloud app deployment

Amazon Web Services has added a further layer of automation to its multi-service cloud.

CloudFormation, announced Friday, allows bundled Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure stacks to be created and deployed by a single text-based template document.

"AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create a collection of related AWS resources and provision them in an orderly and predictable fashion," AWS wrote in release notes for the tool.

CloudFormation supports the majority of AWS' resources, including EC2 instances, Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and the AWS Relational Database Service (RDS). A full list is available from the CloudFormation FAQ.

The tool comes with sample templates to deploy AWS application stacks for a variety of cloud applications, such as blogging platform WordPress, the Joomla CMS and MantisBT, a bug tracker.

The service is provided for free to AWS customers. However, users will be automatically signed up to all AWS services used by CloudFormation and billed on a per-use basis.

In January, AWS announced Elastic Beanstalk, a tool that simplified the process of uploading applications into the AWS cloud.

CloudFormation sits a rung below Elastic Beanstalk — rather than automating the deployment of applications, it automates the creation and deployment of application-specific stacks.