AWS CloudFormation vs. Azure DevOps Services

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS CloudFormation
Score 8.8 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
Azure DevOps Services
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Pricing
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
Editions & Modules
Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
$0.00
Handler Operation
$0.0009
per handler operation
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Basic + Test Plan
$52
per user per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
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 CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
Considered Both Products
AWS CloudFormation
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.
Azure DevOps Services

No answer on this topic

Features
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
AWS CloudFormation
8.2
2 Ratings
2% above category average
Azure DevOps Services
-
Ratings
Infrastructure Automation8.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Provisioning8.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Parallel Execution8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Node Management7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Logging7.52 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control9.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.8 out of 10
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
GitHub
GitHub
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
Perforce P4
Perforce P4
Score 6.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(7 ratings)
8.4
(70 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(2 ratings)
7.6
(9 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(11 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOps Services
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.
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Microsoft
DevOps is much more user friendly than Git itself. There is a more GUI-centric interface, tighter integration with the Azure / Entra architecture. For those of use in the Microsoft-sphere, it really is excellent for code-centric project management. I rate this as an 8 because it does not seem quite as well suited for fully functional / non-code project aspects in implementation. Nor does it have customer / end-user portal / front end for easy reporting and insight.
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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
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Microsoft
  • Flexible Requirements Hierarchy Management: AZDO makes it easy to track items such as features or epics as a flat list, or as a hierarchy in which you can track the parent-child relationship.
  • Fast Data Entry: AZDO was designed to facilitate quick data entry to capture work items quickly, while still enabling detailed capture of acceptance criteria and item properties.
  • Excel Integration: AZDO stands out for its integration with MS Excel, which enables quick updates for bulk items.
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.
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Microsoft
  • I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
  • The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
  • It could improve the search slightly better.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
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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.
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Microsoft
Azure DevOps is a powerful, complex cloud application. As such there are a number of things it does great and something where there is room for improvement. One of those areas would be in usability. In my opinion it relies too much on search. There is no easy way to view all projects or to group them in a logical way. You need to search for everything.
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Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
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Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Was not part of the process.
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
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
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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.
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Microsoft
  • We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
  • We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
  • We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
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