AWS CloudFormation vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

AWS CloudFormation is well suited for scenarios where all of your resources need to be provisioned on AWS but it is not suited for hybrid cloud deployments. It's very easy for someone new to learn. The level of customization offered as part of the template specifically for AWS services is great. There is also a UI tool where we can drag and drop the services we want and it generates an yaml file which is very easy to use. The visibility of stacks and its resources and one place where we can track and identify the issues in deployment is great.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean Droplets are the best choice for developers teams that need reliable Linux servers to deploy their projects, the ability to create a droplet for testing purposes then destroy it, and only get charged for the few hours used makes the chances of messing up very slim. DigitalOcean Droplets is a great solution because the servers are scalable and the process of adding more resources like CPU or RAM to an existing droplet takes only a few minutes and once a server is scaled up it can also be scaled down if necessary which is perfect for supporting a temporary peak in traffic for example.

Incentivized

• SaaS
• Paas
• Iaas
• On promises

Incentivized

• Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use
• Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation
• Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more

Incentivized

• 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

• In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations.
• No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage.
• Number of service is quite limited.

Incentivized

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 it's a bit more complex, Terraform might be the way to go.

Incentivized

DigitalOcean Droplets is continuously evolving to be more and more powerful. It has great features and has low cost options, which is really great for developers. Its CDN, Loadbalancer, etc. make it a good place to host a high-traffic application. Moroever, DigitalOcean Droplets has a nonprofit program that helps nonprofit sites to run their infrastructure, which is tremendous and no competitor of DigitalOcean Droplets does that.

Incentivized

• It has a positive ROI
• Less time inverted in bugs
• More stable source code

Incentivized

• Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud
• Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors
• The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible

Incentivized