AWS CloudFormation Reviews

What is our primary use case?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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…

What is our primary use case?

We use it for deploying all the Infrastructure: VPCs, EC2 instances, storage solutions, most managed services. Providing IAM configuration, providing group account configurations, role management within IAM. CloudFormation is THE Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solution AWS recommends. Almost everything should, according to AWS, be automated and managed using CloudFormation - whenever possible. Within our organization, mostly the DevOps engineers use AWS CloudFormation — around 42 of them.

What other advice do I have?

There's probably a lot of people that are trying to work around it. Or, to avoid it. My advice would be: use it when Amazon says so because it's probably the most straightforward approach to your problem. Afterwards, then you can become creative, for it's worth putting in the effort. On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of seven. That rating would, definitely, be higher if CloudFormation would be made available on other platforms, outside Amazon.

What is our primary use case?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

What is our primary use case?

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

What other advice do I have?

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…