CADT templates
What are CADT templates
CADT templates capture common application configurations so you can deploy a full architecture without building it from scratch. Starting from a template reduces setup time and keeps configurations consistent across your team.
Template types
CADT provides four template types. In the top navigation bar, click Create. The drop-down menu shows Official Templates, Custom Templates, Shared Templates, and Partner Templates.
Official Templates: Maintained by the CADT product team and available to all users. These templates cover common cloud adoption patterns across categories such as Best Practices, Industry Applications, Security and Compliance, and Data Analytics. Use the category tags on the Official Templates page to filter and find the architecture you need.
Custom Templates: Templates you create from your own application configurations, available for personal reuse or sharing with specific users. On the Custom Templates page, each card shows the template name, region, VPC CIDR block, and key resource thumbnails. Sort by last update time or search by keyword.
Partner Templates: Deployment templates provided by Alibaba Cloud partners, available to all CADT users. On the Partner Templates page, sort by Recommended or use the search box to find a template. Each card shows the template name and usage count.
Template variables
Limitations of fixed templates
When you create an application from a template, it copies all resource configurations from that template. Every application built from the same template gets identical settings. This works until you need different configurations for different environments — for example, two applications from the same template but with different Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance types and disk sizes. Without a way to customize individual resource properties, you must maintain separate templates for each variation, which defeats the purpose of reusable templates.
How template variables work
Template variables let you parameterize specific resource properties within a template. Instead of hardcoding values, you define variables and assign values to those variables each time you create an application, tailoring the final configuration to your needs.
In the CADT visual designer, select an ECS resource to open the configuration panel on the right. Fields such as Purchase Option, Availability Zone, Quantity, Billing Method, and Instance Type display an fx button when they support variable assignment. Click fx to assign a value using a function or a template variable.
Template variables are supported only when creating applications through CADT API operations. CADT provides two types of template variables:
Local template variable: Bound to a specific property of a single resource. For example, define an ECS instance name or an ApsaraDB RDS billing method as a local variable.
Global template variable: Not bound to any specific resource property, but can supply values to multiple local variables across different nodes. For example, set the
${sys}global variable toERP. You can then use${sys}to populate the${name}local variable in both ECS and RDS nodes simultaneously, adding the same suffix to all corresponding instance names.
For configuration steps, see Configure template variables.