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AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation

Overview

What is AWS CloudFormation?

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,…

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Recent Reviews

Aws

5 out of 10
December 30, 2021
Incentivized
Our organization has a decision that to migrate from on-premises infrastructure to cloud this was one of the best decisions ever happened …
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Pricing

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Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account

$0.00

On Premise

Handler Operation

$0.0009

On Premise
per handler operation

Entry-level set up fee?

  • No setup fee
For the latest information on pricing, visithttps://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/p…

Offerings

  • Free Trial
  • Free/Freemium Version
  • Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos

Demo AWS Lambda with boto3

YouTube
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Product Details

What is AWS CloudFormation?

AWS CloudFormation provides a common language for users to model and provision AWS and third party application resources in a cloud environment. AWS CloudFormation allows users to use programming languages or a simple text file to model and provision, in an automated and secure manner, all the resources needed for applications across all regions and accounts. This provides a single source of truth for AWS and third party resources.

AWS CloudFormation Features

  • Supported: Model infrastructure and application resources
  • Supported: Automate & deploy
  • Supported: Infrastructure as code
  • Supported: Extensibility
  • Supported: Authoring with JSON/YAML
  • Supported: Authoring with familiar programming languages
  • Supported: Safety controls
  • Supported: Preview changes to your environment
  • Supported: Dependency management
  • Supported: Cross account & cross-region management

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

AWS CloudFormation Videos

Introduction to AWS CloudFormation
Governance with AWS

AWS CloudFormation Competitors

  • HashiCorp Terraform
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)
  • Puppet Enterprise (formerly Puppet Data Center Automation)

AWS CloudFormation Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux, Mac
Mobile ApplicationNo
Supported CountriesAmericas, Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific

AWS CloudFormation Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

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. CloudFormation takes care of this. After the AWS resources are deployed, users can modify and update them in a controlled and predictable way, in effect applying version control to AWS infrastructure as with software.

HashiCorp Terraform are common alternatives for AWS CloudFormation.

The most common users of AWS CloudFormation are from Enterprises (1,001+ employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(101)

Reviews

(1-3 of 3)
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May 06, 2022

AWS CloudFormation - The best service to deploy your infrastructure on AWS

Verified User
Professional in Research & Development
Oil & Energy Company, 5001-10,000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use AWS CloudFormation to deploy our infrastructure on AWS platform. We have different accounts for different customers with the services being deployed via CloudFormation templates. All we have to do is modify the respective values of stages, environment variables for deployments and you could use the same template for deployment to different customers which makes our life easy.
Pros and Cons
  • 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
  • Some services take a lot of time to create and it is frustrating after waiting for 20 mins some service fails, we have to retry whole process again.
  • Deleting some resources is bit tricky if they are dependent on other stacks which is again dependent on some s3 bucket not being deleted
  • Error description is not clear in some instances.
  • Documentation needs to be improved
Likelihood to Recommend
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.
Most Important Features
  • Reusability
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
  • AWS quick support for any issues related to CloudFormation deployments
  • Stack Visibility and segregation
Return on Investment
  • Faster deployment
  • A one time setup which eliminates rework
  • Disaster Recovery
Alternatives Considered
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.
Other Software Used
August 16, 2021

AWS CloudFormation - The Perfect Tool for IaC and Infrastructure Provisioning on AWS

Verified User
Professional in Professional Services
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We are using AWS CloudFormation to provision infrastructure on AWS in different AWS accounts for different environments. It is being used by the whole company. We have a product that requires infrastructure on the cloud to make it run. It helps us in continuous delivery and fast infrastructure deployment. As we have more than 20 environments, AWS CloudFormation helps us in using the same templates with different values for each environment, resulting in reusability and saving time and effort.
Pros and Cons
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
  • Stack Visibility
  • Auto Rollback
  • Console for History and Tracking
  • Better Integration with AWS Services
  • 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.
Likelihood to Recommend
AWS CloudFormation is well suited when you have your whole infrastructure on AWS. It can be used to divide your whole infrastructure into multiple templates so you can redeploy variable infrastructure separately. It is good for infrastructure stack visibility and tracking. It is not good when you have resources on multiple clouds. Cloud-agnostic tools like Terraform can be used for such purposes.
Most Important Features
  • Infrastructure Provisioning
  • Templating
  • Visibility
  • Reusability
  • IaC
Return on Investment
  • Fast Delivery
  • Fast Environment Spin Up
  • IaC for Reusability and Disaster Recovery
Alternatives Considered
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 Enterprise is paid for teams. Terraform is good when we need to stay cloud-agnostic meaning multi-cloud infrastructure capability.
Other Software Used
August 12, 2021

Great for what it does. Could be simpler to use, and have a wider use case in general.

Verified User
Employee in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use it to expedite or deployment for VPCs. It creates almost all of the resources we need to for the most basic standup with a few parameters that get filled in. We can also use it to deploy smaller resources as well that don't require a full VPC standup. We're also looking into it for other use cases, but for the most part, it has greatly decreased the time to stand up a new VPC.
Pros and Cons
  • Logging errors
  • Template builder (for the more visually inclined).
  • General documentation
  • Better examples
  • There are oddities with the yaml aspects of it, that make it a bit cumbersome
  • A template for use cases that are easily fillable - or just some place to start.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think repeatable tasks that require a lot of "clicking" are where it's best suited. Also, for VPC and smaller deployments, I think it's a great tool, but it does have some limitations. Not all resources are available, so sometimes you can only create the base part of your deployment, and manually have to input some values later on. From my understanding, Cloudformation is best while contained within individual regions of AWS.
Most Important Features
  • Resource deployment
  • Logging
  • Rollback when needed.
Return on Investment
  • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
  • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
  • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
Alternatives Considered
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.
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