AWS CloudFormation vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

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
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.
$4
per month
Pricing
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
Editions & Modules
Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
$0.00
Handler Operation
$0.0009
per handler operation
Basic
$4
per month
CPU-Optimized
$42
per month
General Purpose
$63
per month
Memory-Optimized
$84
per month
Storage-Optimized
$131
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
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.Pricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
Features
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
AWS CloudFormation
8.2
2 Ratings
2% above category average
DigitalOcean Droplets
-
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
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
AWS CloudFormation
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean Droplets
8.8
1 Ratings
7% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings5.01 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings9.01 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Best Alternatives
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
Small Businesses
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.8 out of 10
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.0 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(7 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS CloudFormationDigitalOcean Droplets
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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DigitalOcean
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.
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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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DigitalOcean
  • 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
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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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DigitalOcean
  • 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.
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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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DigitalOcean
Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward
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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
Read full review
DigitalOcean
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.
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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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DigitalOcean
  • 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
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