AWS CloudFormation

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.7 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudFormation Verified User Team Lead Chose AWS CloudFormation The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose AWS CloudFormation Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Analyst Chose AWS CloudFormation Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Professional Chose AWS CloudFormation As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Employee Chose AWS CloudFormation We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if … Incentivized Helpful? Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Chose AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more … Incentivized Helpful?

Features

AWS CloudFormation

Configuration Management

Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
	AWS CloudFormation 8.2 2 Ratings 2% above category average
Infrastructure Automation	8.52 Ratings
Automated Provisioning	8.52 Ratings
Parallel Execution	8.02 Ratings
Node Management	7.52 Ratings
Reporting & Logging	7.52 Ratings
Version Control	9.02 Ratings

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend	8.0 (7 ratings)
Usability	8.0 (2 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend	Amazon AWS I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Amazon AWS All resources can segregated based on stacks which provides greater visibility A complete audit trail of what went wrong while deploying a particular resource Automatically rollbacks if any service as part of CloudFormation results in an error The UI tool is useful Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	Amazon AWS Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved. Slow to create, delete or update. Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	Amazon AWS It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works. Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable. However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Amazon AWS Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information. Management guide.For information copy of the original. The new virtual Cloning virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	Amazon AWS + We can standup a VPC in minutes - It took a lot of inital time to set up + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots