What is the purpose of AWS CloudFormation?

The purpose of AWS CloudFormation is to create and manage AWS infrastructure as code. This service allows users to define their cloud resources and configurations in a declarative way using templates. These templates are written in JSON or YAML format and can describe the desired state of various AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, security groups, and load balancers.

By using CloudFormation, organizations can automate the provisioning of their infrastructure, ensuring that resources are created consistently and reducing the potential for human error. This approach enables version control, replication in different environments, and easier management of large-scale infrastructure, making it much simpler to update or roll back changes as needed.

In contrast, the other choices do not capture the primary functions of CloudFormation. Monitoring application performance relates to tools and services focused on tracking metrics and logs, while deploying applications automatically can involve other services like AWS Elastic Beanstalk or AWS CodeDeploy. Providing documentation for services refers to an entirely different aspect of service management and usability that does not align with the core functionality of CloudFormation.