Answer: AWS CloudFormation

## Explanation AWS CloudFormation is the correct answer because it serves a similar purpose to VM templates in on-premise environments. Here's why: - **AWS CloudFormation** allows you to create templates (in JSON or YAML format) that define your AWS infrastructure, including EC2 instances, networking, storage, and other resources - These templates can be version-controlled and reused to consistently deploy identical environments - Similar to VM templates that capture the configuration of virtual machines, CloudFormation templates capture the entire infrastructure configuration - When you deploy a CloudFormation template, it automatically provisions all the specified resources in the correct order with the defined configurations **Why other options are incorrect:** - **AWS Elastic Beanstalk**: Focuses on application deployment and management, not infrastructure templating - **AWS OpsWorks**: Configuration management service for Chef and Puppet - **AWS Systems Manager**: Operations management and automation tool - **AWS CodeDeploy**: Automated application deployment service - **AWS CodePipeline**: Continuous delivery service for release pipelines CloudFormation provides the infrastructure-as-code capability that most closely matches the templating functionality of on-premise VM templates.

Author: Ritesh Yadav