Forge sits between the infrastructure definitions you already own and the CloudFormation execution engine—turning every potential deployment into a staged, explainable, operator-controlled artifact.
Forge is not another authoring language. Keep CloudFormation YAML where it belongs and add an operational layer focused on understanding, staging, inspection, governance, and release.
Validate parameters, resolve the environment, upload the desired template tree, and create a CloudFormation Change Set without touching production.
A local stage artifact preserves the exact stack, environment, region, Change Set, resource summary, template diffs, and lifecycle state.Compare deployed and desired nested templates by presence, SHA-256, and normalized body—not just the root stack summary.
Forge surfaces added, removed, and modified templates alongside unified body diffs for the files that actually changed.Trace parameter changes through nested-stack updates and connect one changed input to the resources and stacks it affects.
Inspect the old value, new value, dependent outputs, nested stack impact, and CloudFormation action in one release artifact.Revalidate the staged Change Set, require operator confirmation, execute, wait for completion, and capture outputs and failure events.
Identity checks guard stack, environment, and region before Forge moves a stage from STAGED to RELEASING and RELEASED or FAILED.The CLI makes the release boundary explicit. Analysis and artifact creation happen before execution; release is a separate command with a separate confirmation.
01$ forge stage infra -e dev1-us02Loading template: infrastructure/root.yaml03Validating parameters...04✓ Parameter validation passed05 06Stage Summary07------------------------------08Additions: 109Modifications: 310Replacements: 011Deletions: 012 13Changes detected.14Staged deployment is releaseable.