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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AWS CloudFormation

    Score8.1 out of 10
    N/AAWS 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

    AWS OpsWorks

    Score4.3 out of 10
    N/AAWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.N/A
    Pricing
    AWS CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    Editions & Modules
    Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
    $0.00
    Handler Operation
    $0.0009
    per handler operation
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AWS CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsThere 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 CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Best Alternatives
    AWS CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    Small Businesses
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    HashiCorp Vagrant
    Score9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    IBM Terraform
    Score8.7 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    AWS CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    6.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AWS CloudFormationAWS OpsWorks
    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
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    Amazon AWS
    Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
    • easy configuration management deployment via Chef
    Incentivized
    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
    • To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
    • The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Amazon AWS
    Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Read full review
    Amazon AWS
    • very quick way of creating new infrastructure
    • low maintenance costs
    • easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    AWS CloudFormation Screenshots

    Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overviewScreenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it worksScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template exampleScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview