easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/
want to include in the stack, such as an Amazon EC2 instance or an Amazon S3 bucket. "Resources" : { "MyEC2Instance" : { "Type" : "AWS::EC2::Instance", "Properties" : { "ImageId" : "ami-2f726546" } } } http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/resources-section-structure.html ANATOMY OF A CLOUDFORMATION TEMPLATE
a resource is created or when a property is defined. "Conditions" : { "CreateProdResources" : {"Fn::Equals" : [{"Ref" : "EnvType"}, "prod"]} }, http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/resources-section-structure.html ANATOMY OF A CLOUDFORMATION TEMPLATE
creation of the AWS CloudFormation JSON by writing Python code to describe the AWS resources. Troposphere also includes some basic support for OpenStack resources. https://github.com/cloudtools/troposphere