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

The AWS CloudFormation linter provides additional static analysis beyond aws cloudformation validate-template

It will inform you which resource types and instance types are unavailable in certain regions, validate property values against allowed values, catch circular resource dependencies, syntax errors, template limits, and much more

In addition to the CLI, one of the most popular mechanisms to remember to run the linter is installing an editor plugin like the Visual Studio Code extension which runs on every file save

Other mechanisms like pre-commit Git hooks are described here