AWS CloudFormation Reviews

We are a computer consulting company and AWS CloudFormation is one of the solutions that we provide to our customers.

CloudFormation is definitely an integral part of AWS Native solutions. It is used for setting up your environment, such as your DNS structure. If something happens in your current environment, such as a disaster, then you can bring up the environment in another region by using the CloudFormation template. Essentially, it is a tool that is used for automating cloud deployment.

The templates are helpful because they can help to get a quick start on a project. You can spin up your development environment immediately, do some jobs, and get it out of the way.

There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides.

One really good thing is that you don't have to be specific when it comes to sequencing.

The automatically template creation feature is good, although it needs to be made a bit more extensive.

This tool is not intuitive and there are others that are easier to understand. It is very powerful but it can be developed to make it much easier to use. The learning curve is pretty steep. Unless you have been working with it for a long time, looking at a CloudFormation template is a tough job. The aim should be usability for a person with a non-coding background.

There is a lot of syntax and components that require you to look at the documentation, whereas with the inclusion of a few drop-down menus and choices, it would be much easier to work with.

You can have CloudFormation create a template based on your existing infrastructure, but not all of the services are included. For example, if you manually set up an environment and you have put in all of the scaling information then you can extract the entire infrastructure and get back a template. CloudFormation is then capable of recreating the environment but it might not have the scaling included automatically.

We have been using AWS CloudFormation for six to seven months.

This is a stable solution. It is a bit of a challenge because the learning curve is steep and it requires a lot of expertise, but it is stable.

Our customers are a mix in terms of size. We have small, medium, and large-sized companies as clients.

We have interacted with technical support at times and from my experience, it has been pretty nice. The support is okay.

I have also used Terraform, which is a bit more user-friendly than CloudFormation. It is quite a bit more intuitive.

CloudFormation doesn't require any installation. In fact, it is part of the services provided by AWS. The length of time for deployment depends on the type of infrastructure that you're deploying. For example, a simple three-tier, without scaling, with perhaps six or seven instances, will probably take ten or fifteen minutes. Speed-wise it is pretty good, although ultimately it depends on what services you want.

When you are providing this solution to a customer there are a lot of things to consider because there are a lot of moving parts. You always have to get them validated from the AWS site. 

This solution is free to use and does not require a license.

When it comes to this solution, there are a lot of things that happen. New features can come out every week and down the line, there are a lot of new things that come very fast. Keeping up with the innovations or product services that are being introduced is a taxing job.

CloudFormation is not used on a daily basis. It is only used for specific purposes whenever there is a requirement. You use it to set up a certain environment.

My advice for anybody who is considering using this solution to implement their environment is to consider the complexity of what they want to do. If you want to bring up a simple environment and are familiar with coding using JSON or YAML then try it on your own. Importantly, however, it is not enough to be familiar with the scripting language. You need to understand AWS architecture. The combination of these things is required for the template. If you do build it on your own then I would still suggest having it validated by AWS.

If you are unfamiliar with coding or the infrastructure then I would suggest involving a third-party to assist. Not having the proper expertise internally will increase the time required for the project. I feel that it is not a bad idea to involve AWS, as well.

Overall, this solution is good but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

CloudFormation drives most of our AWS configuration. It is the configuration engine for our whole footprint. Literally, everything that we configure in AWS is configured in CloudFormation. We are using its latest version.

Its ability to treat infrastructure's code is valuable. It makes things automatable and reproducible.

CloudFormation is not particularly good at handling cross-account dynamic references. If you try to refer to an object that CloudFormation has created in a separate AWS account, it tends to fall apart. That's because it is a byproduct of the multi-tenant configuration. This is the most glaring shortcoming in my perspective because you can't dynamically reference objects in other accounts that CloudFormation has created, but it is not a shortcoming that you can't overcome. This is the only pain point that I've come across that didn't have a workaround natively. Sometimes the confirmation is slow, and it could be faster.

The downside to CloudFormation when you're fully embracing it is that the AWS services do not get released immediately fully CloudFormation enabled. If you need to use the latest AWS service that just got announced or reinvented, you're not going to be able to continue with CloudFormation for the first X number of months. This is because they develop the products separately, and then they hand it to the CloudFormation team, which later on develops a CloudFormation integration. So, if you need to be on the newest thing AWS has, CloudFormation is often going to be a constraint that prevents you from doing that.

I have been using this solution for four years.

It is stable. Crashing is not really a concern. There are edge conditions that probably started off as bugs, but they're pretty well understood. There isn't an issue related to stability, reliability, or anything like that. 

It scales as well as AWS does. Scaling is not a consideration in CloudFormation. You scale the things that feed your templates. In the end, you let AWS itself handle the scaling. Therefore, CloudFormation itself is not under scaling considerations.

Our users of this solution are software engineers, DevOps engineers, and SecOps engineers.

Their tech support is very good at addressing failures. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

I have used other solutions but not in AWS. To solve this problem, CloudFormation is the only thing I've used in AWS.

It all depends on how much you're trying to do with it. The more you're trying to do with it, the more initial load you have to do. If you're just trying to retrieve a single object, you just write a confirmation template to load it up in there. There's nothing else to be done.

It is very quick and almost instant to bootstrap from nothing. I have a confirmation template that does it for me, but obviously, in AWS, doing a thing is not all you do. You do many things layered on top of each other. To get to something truly functional takes some time, but I would say it is pretty quick.

I would rate AWS CloudFormation an eight out of ten. It does what it is supposed to do, but there are certainly ways in which it could be extended, and there are certain ways using which it could be integrated earlier into their release cycle.

We primarily use the solution for creating automated blueprints for deploying machines, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service.

The integration of the solution is very good.

The time to market is really good, I would say. You can quickly set up a blueprint and deploy it.

The initial setup is simple.

The customization is weak. Whether it is good or not depends on the customer's use case.

The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors.

The solution requires Kubernetes support including container ops and staging support.

I've been using the solution for about a year.

We've never had to contact technical support. So far, there haven't been any problems.

I also use vRealize and find that it is better compared to CloudFormation. It has better features.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

It only takes about 15-20 minutes to set up. After that, there's a bit of blueprinting that needs to happen, however, how long that takes really depends upon the person who's building it.

In terms of maintenance, our clients have three options: they could take a managed service from us, where our engineers will go and support the system, they can have some resident engineers in their own company, or, if there are technical problems, they can contact Amazon AWS to get support.

We are system integrators. We help our clients during implementation.

I don't know what the cost of the solution is.

We also use VMware's vRealize automation. vRealize has better orchestration workflows. We have prebuilt orchestration workflows available on vRealize and can build the blueprint and basically deploy in any public or private cloud vendor, so it's a cloud-agnostic product. This is something AWS lacks.

It also is created on YAML. It's an industry standard, which can, again, be compatible with multiple platforms.

We are a solution provider and system integrator with AWS. We are also a solution provider with VMware.

We don't personally use the solution. Instead, we deploy it for our customers. The companies we work with range from small companies to large enterprises. Our clients use the solution daily.

I'd advise other organizations to definitely have an understanding of the AWS portfolio, and the product portfolio. It's also important to first understand the manual structure because it's basically automating manual tasks. It depends upon how repetitive those tasks are, because sometimes building a blueprint might take a sufficient amount of time and if those are not very repeatable and it's done once in a week or more, then it doesn't make sense to use CloudFormation to automate that.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten.