Although I work for an AWS partner, I've always shied away from AWS CloudFormation, their orchestration technology. However, when I got talking to Will at LocalGovDrupal about reducing the barrier to entry for smaller organisations who want to use the distribution as a starting point, a plan formed. Perhaps the AWS Marketplace would be a good way to allow other councils to find and try out LocalGovDrupal?
The kicker of course is to put something in AWS Marketplace you pretty much need to build it with AWS CloudFormation. CloudFormation basically provides a YAML or JSON formatted means of describing any AWS service so it can be automatically set up and configured, and as a result your infrastructure can be saved in code, in much the same way as the popular Terraform from Hashicorp does, not to mention the AWS Ansible modules. After some Googling I fell upon the AWS Reference Architecture project for Highly Available Drupal. It was pretty out of date, but nice and complete, even with DNS handling and SSL and C