Item: AWS CloudFormation
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with AWS CloudFormation

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

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)

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.

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

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

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.

Comments

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