10. Understanding CloudFormation

CloudFormation

• CloudFormation is a declarative language, not an imperative language.
• CloudFormation handles resource dependencies, so that you don’t have to specify which resource to start up before another. There are cases where you can specify that a resource depends on another resource, but ideally, you’ll let CloudFormation take care of dependencies.
• VPC is the smallest unit of resource.

Glossary

Declarative languages: These languages specify what you want, without requiring you to specify how to get it. An example of a popular declarative language is SQL.

Imperative languages: These languages use statements to change the state of the program.

Additional resources:

• Here is the Wikipedia page describing the differences between the two.
• Here is a Stack Overflow thread describing imperative languages.