Great for what it does. Could be simpler to use, and have a wider use case in general.
August 12, 2021

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

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AWS CloudFormation

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

  • Logging errors
  • Template builder (for the more visually inclined).
  • General documentation

Cons

  • 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.
  • Resource deployment
  • Logging
  • Rollback when needed.
  • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
  • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
  • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
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.

Do you think AWS CloudFormation delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with AWS CloudFormation's feature set?

Yes

Did AWS CloudFormation live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of AWS CloudFormation go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy AWS CloudFormation again?

Yes

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.

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