What does AWS CloudFormation allow you to do?

AWS CloudFormation is a powerful tool that allows you to provision and manage AWS infrastructure as code. It enables you to define your cloud resources using a declarative template written in JSON or YAML. This approach streamlines the process of creating and updating AWS resources in a consistent and repeatable manner.

With CloudFormation, you can create entire environments with a single command, specifying everything from virtual machines to networking configurations and storage solutions. The ability to define your infrastructure in code means you can easily version control your infrastructure setup, replicate environments, and automate deployments.

This is particularly beneficial for DevOps practices, where consistent and reliable infrastructure is crucial for continuous integration and delivery pipelines. By using CloudFormation, teams can reduce the risk of human error that comes with manual configurations and ensure that their infrastructure setups are uniform across different stages of development and production.

In contrast, while creating and managing security policies, monitoring and optimizing application performance, and managing billing and resource usage are all important aspects of AWS, they are not the primary function of AWS CloudFormation. These tasks are better suited to other AWS services specifically designed for security, monitoring, and billing management.