What is the primary use case of AWS CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation is a service that lets you model and provision AWS resources using templates written in JSON or YAML. The primary use case is to treat infrastructure as code, enabling repeatable, version‑controlled deployments of entire stacks. By defining resources such as EC2 instances, S3 buckets, IAM roles, and Lambda functions in a single template, you can create, update, or delete the whole environment with a single command. CloudFormation also handles dependencies, ensuring resources are created in the correct order, and it supports change sets so you can preview the impact of updates before applying them. This approach reduces manual configuration errors, speeds up provisioning, and provides a clear audit trail of infrastructure changes. Because CloudFormation templates are declarative, you can use them with CI/CD pipelines to automate infrastructure changes. The service also provides stack drift detection, alerting you when manual changes diverge from the template. With nested stacks, you can reuse common components across multiple environments, improving maintainability.