CloudFormation

Overview

CloudFormation artifacts allow you to manage AWS infrastructure using native CloudFormation templates while taking advantage of Bluebricks’ orchestration, environment management, and deployment automation. With a CloudFormation artifact, you can define AWS resources declaratively in JSON or YAML, then deploy and track those changes reliably across environments through Bluebricks.

Packaging your CloudFormation template as an artifact centralizes configuration, simplifies parameter management, and ensures your infrastructure operations follow a consistent and auditable workflow. Bluebricks enhances the CloudFormation experience by providing capabilities that streamline provisioning and lifecycle management, including:

• First-class orchestration for create, update, and delete stack operations, with full visibility into stack events and change sets

• Managed parameter handling, including environment-aware inputs and secure secret management

• Consistent multi-environment workflows, ensuring repeatable deployments across AWS accounts, regions, or organizational units

• Versioning and deployment history, enabling clear auditability and traceability for all infrastructure changes

• Native integration with AWS authentication and role assumption, reducing setup overhead and improving security

Package Dependencies and Data Flow

Packages expose inputs (properties) and outputs, enabling them to participate in flexible, modular dependency chains orchestrated through a directed acyclic graph (DAG).

Inputs define the parameters a package requires and can be statically defined or dynamically derived using expressions that reference other packages, blueprint properties, or secrets. These expressions create explicit dependencies between packages, allowing the orchestrator to determine the correct execution order. Inputs also support conditional expressions, enabling packages to be included or excluded based on runtime context.

Outputs represent values produced during package execution—such as resource identifiers, endpoints, or computed configurations—and become available for consumption by downstream packages. This creates a bidirectional dependency flow where packages can safely reference one another’s results.

This design enables unified orchestration across multiple infrastructure-as-code technologies—Terraform, Helm, Bicep, and CloudFormation can coexist within a single blueprint, sharing data and dependencies seamlessly. The orchestrator provides a single plan, single execution flow, and unified state management regardless of the underlying IaC tool. Packages can be sourced from artifacts or directly from Git repositories, allowing complex systems to be built from small, reusable, independently versionable units. The dependency graph is calculated at plan time, ensuring deterministic execution order and enabling parallel execution where dependencies allow.