Amazon Web Services Updates AWS CloudFormation

Amazon (AMZN) Web Services has introduced two enhancements to AWS CloudFormation, the company announced this morning in a blog post. AWS CloudFormation, introduced in 2011, simplifies the cloud administration process by offering templates and enabling administrators to organize and provision cloud resources in an automated way.

The new enhancements take things a step further.  The first update provides parallel stack creation, update and deletion, which improves performance. The management platform automatically determines which resources in a template can be created in parallel.

The second major update to CloudFormation allows nesting a stack as a resource inside a template, specifically it provides the ability to update a top-level stack and its nested stacks together. Before this enhancement, users had to update each nested stack separately.

AWS CloudFormation aims to assist developers and systems administrators with creating and managing a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion by leveraging predefined templates.

Separately, earlier this month research firm Forrester Research reported that software developers are choosing AWS more often than other platform.