How it works...

In this recipe, we created our first REST API using Amazon CloudFormation. In the previous recipe, Building your first API using the AWS CLI, we created a similar API, but with the AWS CLI. Since the properties related to API Gateway API creation were already discussed in that recipe, I will not repeat them here.

We introduced a new CloudFormation template component: Outputs. We also used a sub-function in its value field, in order to derive a sample API endpoint. The maximum output that you can define in a template is 60. Its export parameter (not used here) can be used to specify an export name for the Outputs and reference it from another stack (a cross-stack reference).