[dgivney]

It sounds like you might benefit from AWS Beanstalk which feels like a configuration widget built on top of CloudFormation - https://aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/

Choose your stack and beanstalk deploys to a load balanced, autoscaling group in your VPC. You can attach a RDS when you choose your stack. And all resources can be managed separately or through CloudFormation. Beanstalk also supports container deployments.

From the website > "You can simply upload your code and Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment, from capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling to application health monitoring. At the same time, you retain full control over the AWS resources powering your application and can access the underlying resources at any time. There is no additional charge for Elastic Beanstalk - you pay only for the AWS resources needed to store and run your applications."