All 12 starter templates deployed against real AWS: 44 live deployments in one day, ending 12 for 12

Last week we certified the catalog — lint-clean output, required properties and IAM wiring verified, all of it gated in CI. Today we held the 12 starter templates to the only bar that finally matters: does CloudFormation actually build the stack? So we deployed them against a real AWS account — 44 live deployments across seven rounds in a single day. The first round was humbling: 4 of 12 made it through. Every template in that round passed lint and certification, and 8 still failed at create time — which is exactly why we did this. Lint-clean and deployable are not the same thing. Each failure got a fix-case recording the exact template we deployed, the resource that failed, and AWS's verbatim error; then we fixed, regenerated, and redeployed — 13 distinct defect classes fixed over the day — until the final round ended with all 12 templates reaching CREATE_COMPLETE, and every stack deleted cleanly afterwards. The whole day of live testing cost under $15 in AWS charges.

To be precise about what runs where: these deployments are a manual harness against a live account. CI still guards every change with the static certification checks — but as of today, the templates it guards are ones that have each built a real stack.

Try it: start a project from any of the 12 templates and export the CloudFormation.