>Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

This is not what CloudFormation does. CloudFormation allows a declarative way to express a group of AWS resources to be created and coupled together. There's nothing that's quite exactly the same as CloudFormation, but stock Kubernetes is quite close, since you effectively describe what resources you want in individual declarative YAML/JSON files. However, there's nothing standard in Kubernetes for coupling them together into one thing equivalent to a Stack in CloudFormation.