A team wants to declare its entire AWS infrastructure — VPCs, EC2 instances, and RDS databases — in JSON or YAML templates and deploy the same stack consistently across environments. Which service should they use?
Show answer and explanation
Answer: C
CloudFormation is infrastructure as code in its purest AWS form: you describe every resource in a JSON or YAML template, and the service provisions and updates the stack from that single declaration. Identical templates mean identical environments, which is what repeatability across dev, test, and production demands.
The wrong answers deploy applications, build source code, or drive individual commands — none of them manage declarative whole-environment stacks.
Why the other options are wrong
- A. Elastic Beanstalk packages and deploys application code onto a managed platform; it is not a general template-driven infrastructure service.
- B. CodeBuild compiles and tests source code in a build pipeline; defining infrastructure is outside its scope.
- D. The CLI executes imperative commands one at a time rather than provisioning a declarative, reviewable stack.