Amazon CloudFormation

Amazon CloudFormation is a new way of provisioning software stacks in Amazon EC2. Instead of issuing commands (or running a script) against the different Amazon AWS services you just specify a template JSON file with all your requirements. For example the sample WordPress Template.

Simple CloudFormation API
Once a Template "Stack" is defined you can use the CloudFormation API command CreateStack, passing runtime parameters to the template, to start the Software Stack. Similarly there is a DeleteStack command plus several other commands to display events etc. This makes it a very simple API to implement and will be very useful for tool builders and customers to run Software Stacks in Amazon.

Software Stack = Machine Image(s) + Template + Runtime Parameters
Running Software Stacks becomes:
1. Create Amazon Machine Image(s) with the base application software.
2. Create a Template defining the software stack
3. Run the stack passing configuration parameters at runtime and dynamic parts of the application (like code) via elastic beanstalk.
NOTE: This means Amazon Machine Images should not contain configuration parameters or application code (WAR files etc)

In the future this could become a simple standard for various cloud vendors to provide some interoperability and portability between clouds.

Chef
Ofcourse for bigger and complex systems there is still a role for Chef to build servers. CloudFormation just controls the Amazon AWS resources. A close integration of Chef and CloudFormation would be very desirable. Because they share the same JSON format it could be very consistent. For now it is easy to pass the chef information to a bootstrap script running on the server.

References
Create Your AWS Stack From a Recipe
AWS CloudFormation in the AWS Management Console
Integrating AWS CloudFormation and Chef
The Impact of Amazon’s new CloudFormation service