I wanted to create a very basic, very beginner guide to cloudformation. The information I found on it went 0 to 60 pretty quickly, and I just found myself barely hanging on to understand.

Cloudformation is a way to model an AWS infrastructure in code. This allows for a reasonable way to quickly stand up new environments, ensure state of current environments, or change the state of environments.

I have written a tutorial and provided example templates over at my Github Repo. (Because of the way wordpress formats code snippets, I left all of it over there.)

https://github.com/boblongmore/aws-cloudformation-examples