How can I quickly and effectively debug CloudFormation templates?

Question

CloudFormation is a powerful AWS offering that allows the programmatic creation of AWS resource stacks, such as the web tier of an application, a high performance computing

Answer 1

Use the aws cloudformation validate-template command in the AWS CLI tool. It only validates whether your template is valid JSON or YAML, not whether your keys and values are correct (for example doesn't check for typos in keys)