Question

A CloudOps team maintains a single CloudFormation template that provisions an application stack. They must deploy it to dev, staging, and production, where each environment uses a different EC2 instance type and a different number of instances, but the underlying resource structure is identical across environments. The team wants to keep one template file and avoid hardcoding environment-specific values inside the resource definitions. Which approach best meets these requirements?

Accepted Answer

Use a Parameter for the environment name and a Mappings section that returns the correct instance type and count per environment, referenced with Fn::FindInMap.

Answer

Create three separate CloudFormation templates, one per environment, each with the values hardcoded into the resource properties.

Answer

Use a single template with the production values hardcoded, then manually edit the resources in the console after each dev and staging deployment.

Answer

Store all environment values in the Metadata section and reference them directly from the Resources section using Fn::GetAtt.