In an exciting update from AWS, it was announced that CloudFormation now supports YAML in addition to JSON. I think most of us will agree this is great. The JSON templates worked, but whew, were they hard to read and the lack of the ability to add comments sometimes made my templates look more like sudokus or word searches than anything else.
They also announced the support for cross-stack references. That means no more duplicating resources between templates! There’s a small gotcha with cross-stack references in that the names of the exported values have to be unique in your account and have to be literal string values.