Provisioning and Orchestration
Clicking through the console to provision resources is great for learning, but when needing to create tens or even hundreds of resources, it soon becomes a very large manual task. Two key services help alleviate the burden here: AWS CloudFormation and AWS Service Catalog.
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation is an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) service. You define the resources that you would like to deploy in either YAML or JSON, according to the CloudFormation syntax, and when this code is passed to AWS, it reads the code and deploys the configurations defined within. When you change the resource configurations in the code and pass it back to AWS, the resources will update to reflect the new changes.
Working with AWS CloudFormation is a really important skill to learn, not only because it will feature on the exam but also because IaC is becoming an integral part of any cloud-based job. In the scope of the exam, you may have to look at a snippet...
