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AWS CloudFormation

Score8.6 out of 10

113 Reviews and Ratings

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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, 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.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overview
Screenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it works
Screenshot of CloudFormation - Template example
Screenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview

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Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overview

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features AWS CloudFormation has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 113 ratings of AWS CloudFormation's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Version Control

    Track changes made to configurations over time. Allowing for rollback to previous configurations if needed.

    Category average: 7.3

  • Infrastructure Automation

    Automate the setup of systems to achieve their desired state using configuration files.

    Category average: 8.7

  • Automated Provisioning

    Automatically and systematically deploy, configure, and manage IT infrastructure and resources.

    Category average: 8.3

Areas for Improvement

  • Parallel Execution

    Allows for the simultaneous execution of configuration changes across multiple nodes or components.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Node Management

    Allows for the administration and oversight of individual devices or systems within a network.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Reporting & Logging

    Generate reports and logs to track changes made to configurations, aiding in troubleshooting and auditing.

    Category average: 7.6

Reviews

What users are saying about AWS CloudFormation.
View all reviews

Predictable cloud architectures but not without a catch

Incentivized
Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The big problem it's solving for us is reducing configuration drifts and deployment time. Because of the multiple client stacks that we manage at a go, stack drift is a common issue but it helps us stay on top of that. CloudFormation is basically the foundation of how we enforce governance and scale consistently

Pros

  • Automation is always reliable
  • It integrates with AWS config and cloudtrail so well

Cons

  • I write this just after the recent worldwide AWS outage, so that's one
  • When nested stacks fail deep down, you have too spend way too much time digging through the cloudwatch logs just to locate the root cause. This is something AWS could fix with contextual debugging in their troubleshooters.

Return on Investment

  • Our infrastructure set up time is down by 80%. Initially, onboarding a new client environments could take a week or 2 but now we so it in under 3 days
  • We have insane reliability across client projects thanks to the automations

Usability

Other Software Used

F5 Distributed Cloud App Stack

AWS CloudFormation - The native AWS IaC

Incentivized
Verified User
Team Lead in Engineering (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were looking for an IaC technology, something refreshing after so much hassles with the current bloated terraform repo (our faults, not terraform's). Given that 99.99% of our infra is on AWS CloudFormation & CDK seem like a natural choice.

On top of that, with limited Platform team, the ability to use Typescript for IaC is a big plus, as the software engineers can participate in maintaining their team's own infra.

Pros

  • IaC, transactional on top of that
  • Support for "mainstream" general programming languages
  • Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly
  • OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages

Cons

  • The transactional part could be headache-inducing if you're caught surprised
  • Missing some features like moved / import blocks from Terraform
  • The whole availability of OOP techniques opens the usual OOP can of worms

Return on Investment

  • Individual team members can have their personal sandbox up & running in minutes
  • Standardized environment templates shared across organization
  • Sophisticated RBAC & cost allocation

Usability

Alternatives Considered

HashiCorp Terraform, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Kubernetes

Other Software Used

GitHub, CDK, CircleCare

Robust Tool

Incentivized
Manuela Jacqueline Mercado RodríguezView profile
Senior Full Stack Developer in Engineering at Intellisys D. Corp. (51-200 employees employees)

Pros

  • Configuring Stacks
  • Deploying Stacks
  • Managing Stacks

Cons

  • Sometimes stacks are hard to delete due to the correlation of resources or configurations
  • It could be tricky at first time when doing configurations

Most Important Features

  • Creating Stacks
  • Managing Stacks
  • Doing specific configurations

Return on Investment

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

Alternatives Considered

Heroku Platform

Other Software Used

AWS CodeDeploy, AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeBuild

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

Incentivized
Verified User
Professional in Research & Development (5001-10,000 employees employees)

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

  • 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

Cons

  • 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

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

Terraform, by HashiCorp, Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS)

Other Software Used

AWS Auto Scaling, AWS Lambda, Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS)

Aws

Incentivized
Verified User
Analyst in Information Technology (501-1000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our organization has a decision that to migrate from on-premises infrastructure to cloud this was one of the best decisions ever happened to our company, it's changed the whole lifestyle in our company 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 Resource Management Guide. For information of us and we have to work on a new field for our team to get the information management Foundations for our team Work orders and to help us find out of all our requirements and to help me with your further details please let us if we need two keys to the house to let me try to get your keys in a few weeks before we received WO as I have to work on this and the other one I sent you with is a bit of an email with a B of my email to you to confirm me of your attendance to be there is a B hour course fee and the fee is paid by adding the extra extra extra amount to your invoice for mac bind so we received WO and a few of us have a good idea of what you are you doing for your Christmas and help

Pros

  • SaaS
  • Paas
  • Iaas
  • On promises

Cons

  • Jeddah
  • Riyadh
  • Neom

Most Important Features

  • ERP software
  • Email server exchange server
  • Dns

Return on Investment

  • Speed
  • Save
  • Redundancy

Other Software Used

Azure Backup, AWS Data Exchange, Azure DNS

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