AWS Technical Essentials Practice

AWS CloudFormation enables which of the following functionalities?

1. Creating and sharing APIs

2. Designing and managing stacks

3. Monitoring security compliance

4. Scaling applications automatically

The correct answer is: Designing and managing stacks

AWS CloudFormation primarily focuses on the designing and managing of stacks, which are collections of AWS resources that are provisioned and managed as a unit. With CloudFormation, users can define their infrastructure as code using templates in JSON or YAML format. This allows for easy deployment, updates, and version control of environments. When a stack is created, all of the specified resources are provisioned and configured automatically in a consistent manner, which greatly simplifies resource management and operational efficiency. The other functionalities listed are outside the scope of what CloudFormation specifically provides. Creating and sharing APIs is primarily associated with API Gateway or AWS Lambda products. Monitoring security compliance often involves AWS tools like AWS Config or AWS CloudTrail, which are designed to oversee and audit compliance and security policies. Scaling applications automatically is typically managed through services such as AWS Auto Scaling or Elastic Load Balancing that provide dynamic scaling features based on demand.