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Deploy raw CloudFormation stacks natively, no wrapper CLI required

· 3 min read
Erik Osterman
Erik Osterman
Founder @ Cloud Posse

Teams running raw CloudFormation have always had a choice: call the AWS CLI directly and manage changesets, drift, and StackSets by hand, or reach for a wrapper tool to smooth over the rough edges. Rain filled that role for a lot of people — until it was archived, leaving its users with working templates and no maintained path forward for the CLI, the artifact-bucket bootstrapping, or the changeset/drift ergonomics it provided on top of the AWS CLI.

atmos aws cloudformation lifecycle
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The Problem​

A CloudFormation template on its own isn't a deployment workflow. Someone still has to package and upload oversized templates to S3, create and review a changeset before committing to a change, detect drift after the fact, and orchestrate StackSets across accounts and regions. Doing all of that by hand with the AWS CLI is tedious and easy to get subtly wrong; doing it through a wrapper tool means depending on a binary outside your Atmos toolchain, with its own install, its own config file, and — in Rain's case — no future roadmap.

The Fix​

atmos aws cloudformation (alias atmos aws cfn) deploys, inspects, and deletes CloudFormation stacks directly, with the same stack-based configuration, inheritance, and templating every other Atmos component type already gives you:

  • Core lifecycle — apply/deploy, diff/plan, delete, validate, output, with automatic changeset creation and cleanup behind apply/diff.
  • Changesets and drift — changeset create/execute/list/delete for manual review workflows, drift detect/describe to catch out-of-band changes.
  • StackSets — stackset create/update/delete/instances for multi-account, multi-region deployments, no separate tooling required.
  • Templates, inline or on disk — point path: at a template file, or author the template directly in stack config with template: (a plain string or a structured map) and get Atmos's own {{ }} templating for free, something a file-based template never had.
  • Backend management — backend create/describe/update/delete/list for the S3 bucket CloudFormation packaging uses, with real auto-provisioning when provision.backend.enabled: true is set — no manual bootstrap step required before your first deploy.
  • Observability — tree for the nested-stack dependency graph, logs/watch for live event streaming during an operation, matching the feedback you already get from terraform apply.

How to Use It​

# stacks/catalog/vpc.yaml
components:
  "aws/cloudformation":
    vpc:
      path: template.yaml
      stack_name: "{{ .vars.stage }}-vpc"
      parameters:
        CidrBlock: "10.0.0.0/16"
      capabilities:
        - CAPABILITY_IAM
      provision:
        backend:
          enabled: true
atmos aws cloudformation apply vpc -s prod
atmos aws cloudformation diff vpc -s prod
atmos aws cloudformation drift detect vpc -s prod

Migrating from Rain or raw CloudFormation? The migration guide walks through resolving !Rain:: directives and getting a template deploying through Atmos in about 20 minutes.

Get Involved​

This component type is still marked experimental while it settles under real-world use — see the aws/cloudformation docs for the full configuration reference. Have feedback? Open an issue or join the conversation in the Cloud Posse community Slack.