Which AWS service uses templates for provisioning services known as stacks?

AWS CloudFormation is the service that utilizes templates for provisioning resources in a systematic manner known as stacks. With CloudFormation, you can define your infrastructure as code using YAML or JSON templates, which describe the desired state of your AWS resources. When a stack is created, CloudFormation takes these templates and automatically provisions and manages the specified resources. This allows for consistent and repeatable infrastructure deployment, as users can easily recreate environments, manage updates, or roll back changes if needed. The ability to version control these templates further enhances deployment practices, making CloudFormation a fundamental tool for infrastructure management in AWS environments.

The other services listed do serve important roles within the AWS ecosystem but do not function in the same manner. AWS Service Catalog focuses on organizing and managing catalogs of IT services, AWS Config is geared towards monitoring resource configurations for compliance, and Amazon Cognito provides user authentication and access control functionalities but does not deal with resource provisioning in the context of stacks.