Amazon Web Services vs. AWS CloudFormation

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Amazon Web Services
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing services. With over 165 services offered, AWS services can provide users with a comprehensive suite of infrastructure and computing building blocks and tools.
$0
per month
AWS CloudFormation
Score 8.8 out of 10
N/A
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…
$0
Pricing
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Editions & Modules
Free Tier
$0
per month
Basic Environment
$100 - $200
per month
Intermediate Environment
$250 - $600
per month
Advanced Environment
$600-$2500
per month
Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
$0.00
Handler Operation
$0.0009
per handler operation
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
YesYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAWS allows a “save when you commit” option that offers lower prices when you sign up for a 1- or 3- year term that includes an AWS service or category of services.There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Considered Both Products
Amazon Web Services
Chose Amazon Web Services
In my personal experience, AWS is superior to both GCP and Azure in the majority of usable applications. GCP suffers from the near total misunderstanding of how support system is even supposed to work, and while _some_ services are pretty nifty and well-polished, some are …
Chose Amazon Web Services
AWS stands out in its ability to adapt technology more quickly. All the new features, first adapted by AWS, make it the market leader. The key metrics, such as MTTR, are among the best among all other cloud service providers. The AWS dashboard and analytics features are very …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services Lambda supports more triggers, richer language/runtime support, and has tighter integrations with Amazon Web Services, as compared to Azure/Google Cloud functions.Amazon Web Services also has better global infrastructure, with 33 regions and 105 availability …
Chose Amazon Web Services
We tried various other cloud providers and features provided by them.
Many of the cloud providers have similar features but there are few factors which make Amazon Web Services cloud as preferable choice of our bank are cost, location of Amazon Web Services datacenter where it …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Apart from Amazon Web Services, we use Microsoft Azure in some of our projects. I have some basic experience in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well. If given a choice, I would prefer using Amazon Web Services over Azure or GCP. I find provisioning of resources relatively faster …
Chose Amazon Web Services
we feel that Azure is a little more clunky and not as user friendly as the AWS model.
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is better among all of them due to its performance, stability, security and navigation. It effectively saves the cost and provides better facilities than the other competitors. It plays great role when it comes to user friendly interface. It also provided …
Chose Amazon Web Services
AWS has the largest market share and most established and over 200 services for diverse needs. AWS has a very power user interface and pay as you go work well that others. AWS has the by far largest network of data centers for low latency and high availability. The regular …
Chose Amazon Web Services

Better global availability and use across industries.
AWS has a great ecosystem of experts, developers, solution architects and it helps to get to know them at various AWS events across the world
Chose Amazon Web Services
Ive only used amazon web services for cloud computing, and the decision was made by the CTO.
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is much more mature than all of the cloud service providers out in the market. It has 300+ services that solve almost all of your cloud problems.
Chose Amazon Web Services
Compared to other providers like Google Cloud Platform(GCP) and Microsoft Azure, [Amazon Web Services] has a wider range of services, which help you easier implement the solution you want. Also, they have been in the market for more years than their competitors. Moreover, they …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon SageMaker is being extensively used by our R&D department for machine learning models development and research purposes. We work in Jupyter notebooks hosted on SageMaker notebook instances rather than notebooks hosted in local machines by doing so most ML algorithms …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Terrible. Same as above.
Chose Amazon Web Services
I feel AWS usage of services by global clients has been the most compared to Azure or Openshift.
AWS service offering's and usage are economical and much more secured. Its has build an ecosystem of providing all the services capabilities under one umbrella . It provides …
Chose Amazon Web Services
The decision was made to go with AWS because of name recognition and familiarity by contractors we hired. I checked out Google Compute Engine a few years ago, and it did have similar option set, however Google in general was behind Amazon's offerings.
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services fits best for all levels of organisations like startup, mid level or enterprise. The services are easy to use and doesn't require a high level of understanding as you can learn via blogs or youtube videos. AWS is Reasonable in cost as the plan is pay as you …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services is well suited when we have a huge amount of data to store, process, manipulate and get meaningful information out of. It is also suitable when we need very fast data retrieval from the database. They provide a superior product at a fair price which allows …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Both the services are in the field for quite sometime. And the biggest competitor of Amazon Web Services is Microsoft Azure. Though, Azure easily connects with Microsoft services like a jelly, even in AWS its so easy. And the best thing is due to its vast variety community …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Amazon Web Services has a much more seasoned and known set of tools. The learning resources and documentation is much more prevalent and applicable to more scenarios which definitely helps with implementation. Google cloud does offer comparable products, and the user interface …
Chose Amazon Web Services
We evaluated Google Cloud and Azure at the beginning of our cloud journey but at that time, AWS was so far ahead of the other public cloud providers that there was no question about whether or not to go with AWS. They have the broadest catalog of services and their support is …
Chose Amazon Web Services
We have investigated Azure as well, for this specific need it made the most sense to go with [Amazon Web Services], the design was much simpler to get going. We have also used Azure for some of the other deployments that we have done with SaaS systems. These are the two …
Chose Amazon Web Services
Our tech team was comfortable with Amazon Web Services and that is why we started with Amazon Web Services. In the meantime, we searched for other services like Amazon Web Services but it seems that facilities like Elastic Bean and the first year free made us stick to Amazon …
AWS CloudFormation
Chose AWS CloudFormation
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.
Chose AWS CloudFormation
Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured …
Chose AWS CloudFormation
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 …
Chose AWS CloudFormation
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 …
Chose AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more …
Chose AWS CloudFormation
The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform …
Features
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Amazon Web Services
8.2
Ratings
2% above category average
AWS CloudFormation
-
Ratings
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime9.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Dynamic scaling9.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Elastic load balancing9.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-configured templates7.40 Ratings00 Ratings
Monitoring tools7.00 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images6.50 Ratings00 Ratings
Operating system support8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Security controls8.30 Ratings00 Ratings
Automation8.70 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Small Businesses
DigitalOcean Droplets
DigitalOcean Droplets
Score 8.7 out of 10
HashiCorp Terraform
HashiCorp Terraform
Score 8.5 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
Enterprises
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.5 out of 10
Ansible
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend
9.0
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.4
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Availability
9.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
7.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Amazon Web ServicesAWS CloudFormation
Likelihood to Recommend
We are using RDS for the database services. With RDS, we don't have to manage much, as most of the DBA tasks are automated. For development purposes, we are using Kubernetes pods, which makes it easy to deploy applications and scale up as needed. AWS integration with in-house applications is seamless, making it easy to keep a data-sensitive application on-premises while still utilizing AWS services.
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Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the Cloning Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource. Management guide. For information virtual hardware, installed software cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information.
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Pros
  • Starting an instance and accessing it for testing purpose, demo or production deployment its always easy.
  • All the things which are available over AWS are pretty well managed and easy to use.
  • You might find everything you required for an product and other development over AWS.
  • Its suitable for both either an enterprise or an startup
  • Various resources and documentation are available in case you struck somewhere.
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  • IaC, transactional on top of that
  • Support for "mainstream" general programming languages
  • Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly
  • OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages
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Cons
  • The AWS Management Console can be overwhelming. so a better dashboard and organizing it would improve usability.
  • The pricing models are complex. We need a more clear price calculators and cost management tools to manage our expenses better.
  • Enhancements in cross service compatibility and easier third party integrations could streamline workflow.
  • Simplifying model training in SageMaker and improving IAM for granular access control would make AWS more user friendly
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  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
I would gladly rely on AWS for any large-scale application deployment. For prototyping and small-scale applications, a more heavily managed environment on top of the 'bare metal' virtual infrastructure, such as Heroku or Elastic Bean Stalk, is probably a more productive approach in most cases
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No answers on this topic
Usability
Amazon Web Services is a great tool when it comes to middle size organizations like us. It provides multiple tools and functionalities in low costs. The best feature we have to pay as we go. No financial burden on company for the unused instances. It also comes with greater level of security such as two level authorization such as multi factor authorization.
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It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.
Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.
However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.
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Reliability and Availability
Availability is very good, with the exception of occasional spectacular outages.
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Performance
AWS does not provide the raw performance that you can get by building your own custom infrastructure. However, it is often the case that the benefits of specialized, high-performance hardware do not necessarily outweigh the significant extra cost and risk. Performance as perceived by the user is very different from raw throughput.
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No answers on this topic
Support Rating
The customer support of Amazon Web Services are quick in their responses. I appreciate its entire team, which works amazingly, and provides professional support. AWS is a great tool, indeed, to provide customers a suitable way to
immediately search for their compatible software's and also to guide them in a
good direction. Moreover, this product is a good suggestion for every type of
company because of its affordability and ease of use.
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No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
The API's were very well documented and was Janova's main point of entry into the services.
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No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
In my personal experience, AWS is superior to both GCP and Azure in the majority of usable applications. GCP suffers from the near total misunderstanding of how support system is even supposed to work, and while _some_ services are pretty nifty and well-polished, some are mindbogglingly designed black boxes with self-conflicting documentation. Some of it comes from having legacy systems, sure, but AWS somehow manages, even having a rather big lead start. Azure, from my limited experience, is limited to people somehow coerced into its usage by external constraints. That being said, IF you can design and implement something there, it will probably run fine.
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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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Provisioning resources like large database instances is really quick. We can easily scale our instances up or down as per need.
  • Storing files in S3 instead of onprem NAS drives is much more economical, especially for the files stored in glacier deep archive for compliance purposes.
  • Backup snapshots of EBS volumes and RDS instances may increase the cost of cloud if not cleaned up properly.
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  • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
  • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
  • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
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ScreenShots

AWS CloudFormation Screenshots

Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overviewScreenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it worksScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template exampleScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview