concept CloudFormation Designer in category aws

This is an excerpt from Manning's book AWS CloudFormation in Action MEAP V02. Login to get full access to this book.

2.3       Using CloudFormation Designer

CloudFormation Designer is a useful Graphical tool that runs in the web browser. You can use it to build templates, and it can open existing templates. It works with JSON and YAML. In fact, you can use it to convert the templates we are using as examples in this book from JSON to YAML, if you so desire.  It may help you see the relationship between the various components of templates, and it may be a good tool to use to learn.

On the right, you can choose between JSON and YAML. Note that, as we mentioned before, you can open existing templates with CloudFormation Designer. To convert, you can simply open an existing JSON template, and click on YAML, and voila, save it, and the template is converted.

Figure 2.4 shows CloudFormation Designer with a VPC, Subnet and two EC2 instances, JSON template