Item: AWS CloudFormation
Rating: 10
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AWS CloudFormation

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

Pros

Infrastructure Provisioning
Stack Visibility
Auto Rollback
Console for History and Tracking
Better Integration with AWS Services

Cons

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.

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

Terraform and by HashiCorp

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.

Key Insights

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

Other Software Used

Terraform, by HashiCorp, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Puppet Enterprise

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.

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