Creating Amazon Lightsail resources with AWS CloudFormation

Last updated: October 12, 2021

Amazon Lightsail is integrated with AWS CloudFormation, a service that helps you to model and set up your resources so that you can spend less time creating and managing your resources and infrastructure. You create a template that describes all the resources that you want (such as instances and disks), and AWS CloudFormation provisions and configures those resources for you.

When you use CloudFormation, you can reuse your template to set up your Lightsail resources consistently and repeatedly. Describe your resources once, and then provision the same resources over and over in multiple and Regions.

Lightsail and AWS CloudFormation templates

To provision and configure resources for Lightsail and related services, you must understand AWS CloudFormation templates. Templates are formatted text files in JSON or YAML. These templates describe the resources that you want to provision in your AWS CloudFormation stacks. If you're unfamiliar with JSON or YAML, you can use AWS CloudFormation Designer to help you get started with AWS CloudFormation templates. For more information, see What is AWS CloudFormation Designer? in the User Guide.

Lightsail supports creating instances and disks in AWS CloudFormation. For more information, see the Lightsail resource type reference in the User Guide.

Learn more about AWS CloudFormation

To learn more about AWS CloudFormation, see the following resources:

• AWS CloudFormation

• AWS CloudFormation User Guide

• AWS CloudFormation API Reference

• AWS CloudFormation Command Line Interface User Guide