Can I use a Cloud Formation template in stack set which will spin up different resources in different regions?

Hi, yes, you can. You have a full sample here based on S3 buckets: https://www.cloudxs.ch/2021/02/deploy-into-multiple-aws-regions-with-cloudformation/

You will have to replace the bucket with an EC2 instance in your use case.

This lab may also help: https://www.wellarchitectedlabs.com/reliability/200_labs/200_deploy_and_update_cloudformation/6_multi_region_deploy/

Hope it helps! Didier

Short answer: you can't. I recommend you use two different templates in two regions and update them independently.

As AWS CloudFormation is a regional service, there is no direct way within a template to create AWS resources in different regions than the one you are creating the stack in. There are although alternative workarounds that add complexity to your deployment:

• You may want to use AWS StackSet and using conditions in order to deploy the same template in two regions and filter based on the region it is deployed in.
• You may want to use a custom lambda function to create the resources in another region.

Note that updating resources in multiple regions that depend on each other is considered an anti-pattern and cannot properly be orchestrated within AWS.

You need to have a more elaborate solution to be able to achieve this combined with CF Stackset. What you are missing is an orchestration pipeline that can deploy stacks in various regions from a central place. these resources can give you an idea about the concept :

• Multi-Region Infrastructure Deployment
• Building a CI/CD pipeline for multi-region deployment with AWS CodePipeline