--- title: AWS CloudFormation Reviews meta_title: 'AWS CloudFormation Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 214 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how AWS CloudFormation works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 214 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-09' parent_category: name: CI/CD Tools url: https://www.g2.com/categories/ci-cd-tools --- # AWS CloudFormation Reviews **Vendor:** Amazon Web Services (AWS) **Category:** [Cloud Infrastructure Automation Software](https://www.g2.com/categories/cloud-infrastructure-automation) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 214 ## About AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation is a service that enables users to model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources in a secure and automated manner. By defining infrastructure as code through JSON or YAML templates, CloudFormation allows for consistent and repeatable deployment of resources, facilitating efficient management of complex infrastructures. Key Features and Functionality: - Infrastructure as Code: Define and provision AWS resources using JSON or YAML templates, enabling version control and repeatable deployments. - Resource Management: Manage a wide range of AWS services, including EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and Lambda functions, through a single template. - Automation and Consistency: Automate the provisioning and updating of infrastructure, ensuring consistency across multiple environments. - Scalability: Scale infrastructure globally and manage resources across multiple AWS accounts and regions through a single operation. - Extensibility: Extend infrastructure management to include third-party resources and custom applications using the AWS CloudFormation Registry. - Safety Controls: Utilize features like Rollback Triggers and Change Sets to monitor and manage stack operations, enhancing the reliability of deployments. Primary Value and Problem Solved: AWS CloudFormation simplifies the process of managing and provisioning cloud infrastructure by treating it as code. This approach reduces manual intervention, minimizes errors, and ensures consistent deployments across various environments. By automating resource management, CloudFormation accelerates the development and deployment cycles, allowing organizations to focus on building applications rather than managing infrastructure. ## AWS CloudFormation Pros & Cons **What users like:** - Users appreciate the **automation efficiency** of AWS CloudFormation, allowing easy deployment and management of infrastructure as code. (7 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of Infrastructure Automation** with AWS CloudFormation, streamlining deployment and integration processes. (7 reviews) - Users appreciate the **ease of use** of AWS CloudFormation, benefiting from simple setup and streamlined resource management. (6 reviews) - Users find **efficiency** in AWS CloudFormation's easy implementation of Infrastructure as Code for managing resources seamlessly. (5 reviews) - Users appreciate the **automation ease** of AWS CloudFormation, simplifying resource management and reducing human error. (4 reviews) - Users value the **customization capabilities** of AWS CloudFormation, facilitating ease of implementation and integration with AWS services. (3 reviews) - Users value the **deployment ease** of AWS CloudFormation, simplifying setup and management of AWS resources efficiently. (3 reviews) - Easy Integrations (3 reviews) - Setup Ease (3 reviews) - Users find AWS CloudFormation to be a **time-saving tool** , automating resource management and deployment efficiently. (3 reviews) **What users dislike:** - Users find that the **template complexity** in AWS CloudFormation makes debugging and management challenging and time-consuming. (6 reviews) - Users find the **learning difficulty** significant, particularly for beginners trying to grasp complex concepts and templates. (4 reviews) - Users highlight the **limited cloud support** of AWS CloudFormation, complicating multi-cloud integration and template management. (4 reviews) - Users find the **understanding difficulty** challenging, particularly with concepts like rollback and template complexities. (3 reviews) - Users find the **complex setup** of AWS CloudFormation challenging, particularly with large templates and debugging errors. (2 reviews) - Difficult Customization (2 reviews) - Difficult Learning (2 reviews) - Users often face **difficulties with software bugs** in AWS CloudFormation, as error messages can be unclear and troubleshooting time-consuming. (2 reviews) - Command Line Difficulty (1 reviews) - Delayed Updates (1 reviews) ## AWS CloudFormation Reviews ### 1. It really depends on use case. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 12, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Running environment managed by AWS, perfect documentation and integration with AWS services. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Importing existing resources should be much much easier. Verbosity of changes in Change Set is very poor. Importing resources and resource change info are very weak points of CloudFormation in comparing with Terraform. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Great tool but really depends on use case. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Import existing resources. Great is deep integration with AWS resources like edge lambda, ELB, ECS autoscaling, etc.. ### 2. Amazon CloudFormation Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shubham S. | Project Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 08, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The facility provided by AWS under Cloudformation is awesome by using this all the creation, update, and configuration all are covered or completed within a few secs or minutes. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I don't have anything as a dislike for this but want to mention that YAML is used to create the script and it has to be properly intended otherwise an error will occurred. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using different AWS services and were manually creating the resource and then configuring the same, this process was manual and was taking a lot of time. We have automated this process by creating a cloud formation script and then initiating it for creating the resources and configuring it by using this we are saving a lot of time and reduced manual efforts as well. ### 3. Cloudformation saved our lives from manually managing deployment in datalake built on AWS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 22, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Managing the infrastructure as code helps us use different versions of it using Git, code commit etc. Also, features such as drift always help us informed of a consistent environment. Best part is it has no cost of its own. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Hard limit of having 200 resources per Stack **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Cloudformation serves as a simple tool to deploy your resources quickly. Easy to learn and manage with good amount of support and online documentation available. 😉 **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're building up a datalake on AWS Cloud and there the whole infrastructure is spread across multiple accounts. From IAM to security then the whole of datalake all of this is easily managed by Cloudformation. ### 4. Create new application by building out a template **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 01, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** being able to create a new application using either yaml or json within cloudformation, you can even script this out or use the designer tool that aws has included **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** the designer tool is complicated to use but does get easier to use after spending more time on it and with writing some of the code to go with the designer you can create an application **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** we wanted to create templates that we could use for our application to send it out per a customer to get it building from these cloud-formation templates, using these we can continue to version control our cloud-formation templates with our application and manage it better ### 5. CloudFormation makes it easy! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** We can make nested stacks followed by root stack. Help to automate deployment. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It feels like some kind of magic is going on for deployment. Not able to know inner details how it works. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I recommend for other users who have big pipeline of deployment, do consider AWS cloudformation, it will deploy the service and build required components onn it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** My service require to deploy ECS, S3, RDS, which is possible to deploy on just one go. ### 6. Great way to get started with Infrastructure as Code **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Salvador R. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 29, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Amazon Web Services Cloudformation is a great way to centralize your infrastructure into templates, which enables you to keep it in version control, share it, monitor it, and deploy it in different environments without risking differences in configuration between runs. It ties nicely with most other AWS services and offers **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Not all services are added at launch, which creates a bit of a separation between what can be done and what can not be done, also the syntax is a bit limited, but it only comes to play for large projects. It does tie you down to AWS only, there's no multi cloud support. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Read the docs, they are long and not super easy to navigate, but they are very extensive and in depth, also AWS youtube videos are great. Install addons to your editor to make development easier **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Any new project begins with Cloudformation now, it gives me peace of mind and reproducibility, knowing that everything I've done is in version controled files, and won't change ### 7. I liked the simplicity to use it for AWS operations **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 18, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Simple terminal commands and easy to use it. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Nothing as of now as I have used it for the AWS ec2 services only. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can easily configured the AWS cli in my local and access the AWS instance without any gui and many complex navigation ### 8. Agile, Easy, and Scalable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kyle N. | System Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 25, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like that I have a central place to for all of my configurations in an aws account. Most of our production resources are deployed through CFN and is quite useful. If you throw it in a pipeline you can deploy one template, using YAML or JSON, and deploy to multiple accounts using parameters, account mappings, outputs, etc... **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I think it should be stated to recommend not making resources account specific. I made this mistake on my first few cloud formation templates and then when I built a pipeline for it I was stuck with what I had because I already had developers deploying resources using the resources i created. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Do it! **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using CFN we can deploy infrastructure changes to multiple accounts with one click (if you are using this with code pipeline or even ADO). It gives agility and the capability to easily scale resources in your AWS accounts(s). ### 9. Its a good tool. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Health, Wellness and Fitness | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 23, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Its templates are very good and these could be downloaded as files so can be used in different account. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** A few configuration part otherwise its good. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Try it out, it reduces the work of managing resources a lot. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am setting up a cross account role in which cloud formation template helps me very much. ### 10. All our project resources using as jason and yaml formate **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 18, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** infra as a code scale our infra with safely automated our application **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** unintelligible error waiting time in completing model **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** automation CI/CD ### 11. IAAS made simple using cloudformation **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vinod S. | Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 09, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It is pretty easy to build infrastructure using YAML or JSON very quickly. Learning curve was very short **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There are many areas that still need to be included for building them using CF and also there are some areas that need improvement **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ability to build infrastructure on cloud without adding more costs and very minimal skill requirement ### 12. Flexible & powerful **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 26, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Very flexible. Ability for custom flows using custom resources (lambda). One single place to manage all your infrastructure. You can create stacks, stack sets for multi-region deployments, call other stacks, export variables, put them in SSM, create RDS clusters with integration with secrets manager. Anything that is available as an API is available to use as soon as it's GA'ed. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** YAML does not provide a way to create looping logic. That has to be hard coded (e.g. ability to create 'n' subnets will have to be hard-coded or will have to write repetitive code) **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** For us with serverless deployment, this was a must. We wanted to deploy serverless infrastructure at runtime (creation of a new account). With CFN APIs this was as easy as deploying a stack from the console or CLI. Moreover, other frameworks like Terraform & serverless also use the same APIs to deploy infra & code. We preferred to skip all of that as this meant anything that AWS releases is available to us right away (rather than wait for it to be implemented over Terraform or serverless) **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure deployment & serverless application deployment. One single skillset to do both. ### 13. Cloud formation is a great tool for infrastructure automation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** We have used cloud formation template to provision AWS resources using parameters. It automatically detects required resources and provision them. It reduces a lot of manual tasks. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There was not much I disliked. Its a pretty useful. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure automation and provisioning new environments faster ### 14. I still struggle with cloudformation.. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Karl D. | System Administrator, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 04, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's provided by Amazon Web services free of charge and can be integrated with CDK or other wrappers. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The vanilla version is written in yaml and can get quite long and messy. I dislike that there's quite a learning curve and so many ways to approach CFN. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Use it and get use to it, then hopefully begin to craft it with some sort of imperative language rather than declarative. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation. One stop shop with AWS cloudformation and many other integrated AWS services. We've realized benefits such as managed state storage and drift detection. ### 15. Cloud Administrator **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anshu K. | Cloud Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 27, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Helps us in automating our infrastructure. Wrote code for IAAS to architect the whole environment. It is available on no additional charges. Happy to use as it supports YAML helps in automating our environments using ansible. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** CF is integrated only with AWS. It is getting difficult and complex when our environments gets larger **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Basically architecting our complete infrastructure by writing a script file. This file helps us in tracking the requirements and the process adopted to implement it. ### 16. Great way to spin up new hardware in a manageable repeatable way. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 31, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like that I can define how I want my hardware to be created and then tear it all down when I am done and know that all of the bits and pieces I created have been cleaned up! **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The cloudformation syntax can be challenging. There are some features to some systems that are unavailable for configuration in cloudformation. There is a lag between the time a feature is launched and when it is available in cloudformation. The end of 2018 they started a new console for deploying cloudformation. It is extremely clickly to get the same information as the old one. It is prettier, but not as usable. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** It is part of amazon, so it will be there. There are other tools out there, but they can have more lag than cloudformation, **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configuring infrastructure in AWS in a repeatable way that can be easily accounted for. ### 17. great product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 03, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** we are able to deploy 3rd party product very quick **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** pricing model is a little complex, does not match the size of our organization **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** ability to quickly deploy 3rd party products ### 18. Easy for automation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 25, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Deployment is seamless from cloudFormation, Entire stack can be deployed without the manual intervention. Any changes and production rollouts can be done easily. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There is no dislike as such, It might improve is adding additional SDK's and few more services of AWS. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy Deployments ### 19. Spin up Infrastructure with ease **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Apurv D. | Engineering Manager, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 20, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** 1. All most all services are covered 2. Support of YAML and JSON 3. Excellent when on-demand spin up and tear down of infrastructure is required 4. Wait conditions support 5. Support of Nested Stack 6. Good support on failure and to rollback changes at last stable state / configuration **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** 1. Can be used with AWS only. Integration with other cloud services is not possible. 2. It takes time for new services to be avail for cloud formation template 3. Community support is not excellent **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Before you explore this service, make sure to have enough hands on experience with other AWS services. As JSON formation is easy to program but bit difficult to debug, sometimes it takes more time to debug. If you are setting up CI then I would recommend to use Cloud Formation with Code Pipeline. If you are setting up CD as well, use CodeBuild Stack along. On demand environment-infrastructure creation becomes easy with Cloud Formation. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have some demo assets created which requires higher GPU and CPU cycles as they work mainly with Machine Learning and Image classification problems. To keep server up and running on local premises doesn't help always. To keep the server up and running on cloud makes it costly. Cloud formation solves this problem with great extent. We created cloud formation script and put all required resources in S3 (including formation script). Now by one service call, we can spin up and tear down infrastructure. ### 20. AWS CloudFormation makes Devops easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 29, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I work with machine learning and although making models is a tedious process, it's something that I have trained myself over the years, however when it comes to product-ionize the model, I have to depend on the engineers in my team. No more, with AWS CloudFormation I can run anything just by making either a JSON or YAML file and then running it over either on AWS console or programmatically. Moreover, if the script doesn't run successfully, AWS CloudFormation is smart enough to roll back all the changes. Since, all the deployments over AWS happen via AWS CloudFormation, so this is much faster and one can access AWS CloudFormation log to understand what went wrong. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There is a good learning curve and someone on his/her first day would find this very difficult. I nearly gave this up, but then I watched some Youtube videos that gave me better understanding of the platform. There are certain things that you'd learn over time. Also, you can't export the infrastructure script but only the stack script. Another thing is this can't be used with any other cloud service provider and is only specific to AWS **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I would suggest two things 1. Follow some tutorials from youtube or any other post before you deep dive yourself 2. Don't give up easily, as this is a good service but might take some time to learn **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I was using this to create the infrastructure automatically without going to the console to create a particular stack ### 21. AWS CloudFormation Stack **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Srdjan P. | Front-end developer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The easy way to create Stack with all AWS functions like lambda, SNS, SQA, DynamoDB and more, with permissions for all this function. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Better documentation how to create AWS Stack yaml file. Not easy way to create more different environments. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I think AWS CloudFront is the future for backend side. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Integration all AWS function in one Stack (yaml file). Better deployments and easy way to change new version of Stack for production. ### 22. DevOps made easy, again **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 06, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** FREE, All YAML, No new language to learn, No State to manage Has a usable interface Cross Stack Resource Reference, Nested Stacks Intrinsic Functions Autoscaling, Failure and Rollback Managed by AWS Parallelism and flow management Support Wait Conditions Integrates nicely with other related AWS services (Code Pipeline) Generate and deploy changesets (Terraform plan-deploy) **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Not so great cli, poor logging A new comer will need to go through vast AWS concepts and documentation Can’t integrate with existing resources Modularity (nested stacks/ import export values global) Lack of programmatic statements (Loops/Iterations) Tends to ignore actual deployed infrastructure in favor of it's own state Infrastructure drift detection feature not live yet **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** AWS CloudFormation is a great way to have your infrastructure coded. CloudFormation really shines in it's integrations with other AWS offerings in order to create an end-to-end solution. One of my favorite use-cases is AWS CodePipeline as code in order to achieve Continuous Delivery. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure can be managed and provisioned using code Programmatic representation of the state of our infrastructure Changes can be read, tracked, accounted and reverted The infrastructure itself can be re-created time and again Less Human Intervention and Errors ### 23. Quick deployments saving time and money. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lawanda R. | Cloud Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 29, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ability launch a production environment without provisioning individual route tables, security groups or EC2 instances. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** More custom AMI would be a nice addition. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Definitely would recommend because of ease of use. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The marketplace allows you to launch custom environments that you usually would have to build out yourself. ### 24. Cloudformating makes DevOps easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 09, 2019 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Its really easy service. If you understand YAML/ JSON format, it should not be difficult to understand cloud-formation. If you prefer json over yaml, just use a converter and get it to yaml format and vice versa So, the good thing - all things we do on AWS, they basically get executed via cloudformation. Therefore if we use cloudformation it is bound to be faster. For example, if we want to start an EC2 instance, we can either go to the console, or cli, or programmatic access. Well, nothing can beat cloudformation. Cloudformation is also smart and creates resources simultaneously and in order so that you don't face any issues. I was recently creating a Lex bot and I used aws console, programmatic access and cloudformation and of all them, cloudformation was the easiest. All I had to do was change or copy-paste some parameters. When the cloudformation script fails, it rolls back everything so you don't have to worry about that. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Well, cloudformation is easy but only if you've worked before on it or you understand YAML/JSON. If you have to start anything from scratch on cloudformation, I am pretty sure it is very difficult to work out. One can't write those yaml from scratch. So, it does have learning curve. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I would suggest that you start first with the console and then get the cloudformation template from it and then start editing it. Starting right away might cause problem. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Clouformation can be thought of as code to create infrastructure. I have used it for EC2 instances and lex bots. ### 25. CloudFormation makes deploying full environments or stacks easy and manageable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Reilly H. | Systems Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ability to group resources together configured based on parameters that can be deployed from parameters supplied dynamically at stack creation time and also modified thereafter without having to necessarily rebuild the whole stack. The ability to see what would update and how before submitting the update. The ability to code the stack creation not as a language but as a set of final parameters a la Ansible/Chef/Puppet style rather than specifying each step individually. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** JSON, anything JSON drives me bonkers. I am not really a programmer/developer. I am a Systems Engineer, so YAML is where it's at. Thankfully YAML is supported, did I mention that previously? **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Consider using it to management a DevOps deployment model. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Make managing whole environments easy and help in us support blue/green "red/black in Netflix nomenclature" deployments. ### 26. Using it for everything **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It helps you ensure that all infrastructure that is deployed is managed as code. CloudFormation templates give you all the control over what you put into your account in an auditable and controllable way (provided you configure your repositories etc correctly, but CloudFormation is still at the heart of it). **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** My main annoyance is that not all new resources or features in AWS are adopted by CloudFormation out of the box. You typically see that new features have immediate console, CLI and SDK support, but in cases CloudFormation is lacking which is frustrating if you build your whole infrastructure through CloudFormation. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** It's an automated and native way of managing your resources. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We currently deploy our SaaS product through CloudFormation templates. The SaaS product is a version of our on-premise software realized in the cloud. CloudFormation allowed us to build the tooling required to deploy and manage our environments with it relatively costing less time. ### 27. Automation in top gear **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospitality | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** How convenient to automate the creation of an entire infrastrucutre and application stack in minutes! CloudFormation boost our productivty by at least an order of magnitude and enabled us to experiment new ideas very quickly. It's a must to treat all those resources as disposable commodity and get rid of the snowflake effect/config drift. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** As the usage grow, it is getting cumbersome to manage all those CloudFormation templates. It is hard to componentize and reuse resources. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Although there is a lot of improvement to CloudFormation, it is still better to use it than to manually manage your resources in AWS. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ability to spin a complete prod-like environment in minutes... something that took weeks back in our datacenter. A big plus for reproducbility and deterministic results ### 28. Love it , want to use it more, but so much to learn **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Moosa K. | Technical Infrastructure Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The fact that it can automate about anything and can collaborate multi-tiered provisioning. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Sometime templates can get really complex and although there are sample templates but there are pre-built and sometimes don't help understand the underlying concepts properly. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Use it, it's the backend for a lot of things. Allows for a lot of granular control over services. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deploying microservices basic application. Making provisioning automated. Help our AWS customers utilize our software easily without any manual involvement or minimal at least. ### 29. Making provisioning easier **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Seema S. | Director, Cloud Technologies, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** This is a big enabler for our product - to allow us to provisioning infrastructure as code, quickly. Being that the provisioning is via code, we're also able to standardise the process, hence reducing errors, improving quality and making the process scalable. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Lack of talent pool in the market - so we're not able to hire and adopt as quickly as we would like to. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** building a Paas for internal customers to allow them to focus on business problems ### 30. CloudFormation - Dead easy DevOps **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Travis G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** My favorite part of CFN (CloudFormation), is the ability to use YAML for the templates. Originally templates needed to be valid JSON documents. From a programmatic standpoint JSON would be better, but from a human readable/ease of use standpoint I greatly prefer YAML over JSON for my templates. However, the most important features of CloudFormation is that, 1) It allows for extremely rapid resource deployments and tear downs; Ideal for testing environments or Blue/Green capable infrastructure. This is because CFN will evaluate your configuration template and determine which resources can be created simultaneously and the correct order in which to deploy resources, so you are far less likely to run into "non-existent dependency" issues with your deployments. 2) The ability to create multiple "stacks", as they're called, and have other stacks reference output data from a previously created stack. A simple example would be: creating a stack to build a VPC, subnets, routes, and basic security groups. Setup the stack to output the subnets and security group(s) information so then if you create a new stack for creating servers you can quickly retrieve subnet and security group resource information without having to input that data manually. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation has a lot of little gotcha's. Anyone new to DevOps or configuration management will really need to be on the look out for 'optional' (but 'required') settings when creating CFN templates. An example that comes to mind is the Security Group resource. It has an optional setting to specify a "VPC ID". This setting is optional because early AWS didn't have VPC's and Security Groups were just created and attached to instances directly. However, any environment where there is a VPC requires that you specify the VPC ID in the CFN template otherwise you'll create a "legacy Security Group" a.k.a. An EC2 Security Group instead of the proper "VPC Security Group". While learning about CloudFormation I spent enough time banging my head to want to advise anyone reading this to watch out for things like that. The documentation provided by AWS is solid and will inform you of those gotcha's but when quickly skimming the pages it's easy to miss. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Beware of template gotcha's! If your stack doesn't pass validation you won't have to worry about an infrastructure breaking change being made to your environment. However, you will spend a ton of time banging your head against your desk if you miss them. If something in your CloudFormation template isn't working, re-read the documentation for the resource you are trying to create and be on the lookout for those gotcha's. If it's still not clicking Google with be your next best friend. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I've recently rebuilt my VPC from sratch using CloudFormation for my company. The best solution that I have realized already is that I was able to deploy an Identical VPC for my testing environment, the only change being the IP addressing. I'm still working through templating the rest of my infrastructure to CloudFormation so I can redeploy as IaC (infrastructure-as-code). Another, problem I am solving by having my infrastructure setup as code is that any changes made, can be setup and tracked with tools like github/bitbucket and and damaging changes can be quickly reverted to a working version. DevOps for the Win! ### 31. Simple Autoamtion **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 11, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like how our complete infrastructure can be spun up down to the smallest details with cloudformation. This proved really effective for us at UMD when creating new environments for vendor-ed products which use the same resources. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The learning curve can be a bit steep and debugging can be non-intuitive when templates are large. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** - Hosting of various environments correlated to the needs for our division of IT. ### 32. Major step forward for infrastructure as code **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Declarative syntax for creating almost any resource in AWS helps us create repeatable environments and assists with onboarding new team members. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Long integration testing times for nested stacks. The console needs improvements, especially in how stacks are organized, for example, if nested stacks could be rolled-up under the parent stack in the console, this would make using search less of a requirement. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Nested stacks are very powerful but have some caveats and testing nested stacks can be very time consuming. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reverse engineering snowflake servers and defining the requirements in templates. We are also using CloudFormation templates to help cross-train others. ### 33. Not the best of ease of use, but drift management makes up for it! **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Robert R. | Senior Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Drift management will change office dynamics. We've all had a dev who couldn't be bothered to do things the right way. Now we can nail that person to the wall by showing the unofficial changes they've been making! **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Ease of use isn't as good as some of the third party options, and obviously isn't multicloud. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Reproducable deployments for new software projects ### 34. Making AWS Life Easier! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Security and Investigations | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's an easy and quick way to deploy as well as remove deployments. It's cool enough to be able to do a massive deployment with associated configuration but at the same time being able to remove it all in one shot goes that extra step. It's really nice to know that when it's removed it completely removed. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There's a bit of a learning curve to it and sometimes the instructions and example can be a bit cryptic. It would also help if there was a better repo of templates. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** IAM and EC2 configuration and deployments of solutions. ### 35. The best service ever **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tamir R. | Sr. DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Strong service to manage and control infrastructure in the cloud. ITs a great service for Dev, Staging, Production, Hotfix, DR plan, etc. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** for now, only the new UI, but maybe I just need to get used to that **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** It's a MUST! Without using it, you are not a professional! **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** control over all environments, duplicate stacks between environamnet and tests, etc ### 36. Easy to deploy **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ming H. | System Adminsitator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It can defines everythings with cloudformation . It will create all define apps, services in one run. It is very easy to resovle the issues. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** When it has errors, there not easy to follow documentation. It will need spend most of time to look for solution from Internet. Try it and redeploy it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** WIth deploy apps to AWS cloud ### 37. cloudformation makes resource provisioning easy and repeatable **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anthony A. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** yaml support has helped greatly in speed of writing cloudformation scripts without syntax and formatting errors. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** cross stack tagging and referencing is still not smooth, something like the policy generator that can access existing resources and create dynamic references would be cool **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** provisioning infrasctructure in GovCloud for development and production workloads ### 38. Cloudformation to help customers reliably set up complex environments **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ability to declaratively describe an entire clustered Tableau Server setup is absolutely wonderful; one button push (Via Marketplace) allows customers to try (and hopefully buy) an entire working Tableau Server cluster. No documentation to decypher and minimal tech support hand-holding makes it easy. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** A bit inflexible at times. Some recent developments (macros, for example) may reduce this pain a bit. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Don't be afraid to ask for help; support at AWS is pretty great. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allowing potential customers to set up a Tableau Server cluster with minimal headache ### 39. Cloudformation Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I love how easy it is to deploy large amounts of infrastructure. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I think this has been fixed recently but if something is manually modified outside the template there can be large issues. If an IAM role is already created CF does not like it. I feel like it should be known that if a role already exists that is fine. I could probably tweek this by changing my CF setup but I feel like it should do this out of the box. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** large infrastructure deployments ### 40. It was great using this service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kristofer Earl S. | SRE Teamlead, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** This product is easy to use and very helpful in automating. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** some of the aws resource are not intergrated yet **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you want to automate the creation of your AWS resources. I think this service is for you. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation and fasten creation and deletion of all aws resources ### 41. CFT for the Network Security Architect **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloudformation is simply the best solution for deploying immutable security infrastructure in the cloud. It's flexibility and continuous development are key factors for dynamic deployments of security infrastructure within AWS for the large enterprise **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Up to this point my only dislike was the lack of macros, that has just now been added to cloudformation and I'm looking forward to it's use **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a network security architect CFT is the cornerstone of deploying security infrastrucutre in a consistent and verifiable manner ### 42. Powerful but Confusing **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David L. | Bioinformatics Developer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation is an everything AND the kitchen sink tool for managing AWS resources **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The use of JSON for configuring CloudFornmation is tedious, hard to write and read, and makes it hard to debug. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Don't use JSON **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Spinning up on-demand ephemeral resourceds ### 43. Why AWS CloudFormation? **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Darun J. | AWS Glue Review, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 09, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS CloudFormation allows you to create a template using almost all the services from the AWS environment. This allows us to replicate any model within minutes. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The block design UI used to create a YAML template could be improved. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Best tool to replicate any architectural design **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Created a chatbot with AWS lambda, Redshift and API gateway. Used CloudFormation to replicate this model for different clients ### 44. Changes in infrastructure is not the same as changes in code **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ben H. | Infrastructure Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** For first time creation of infrastructure is done through code and no drift. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Making changes in infrastructure is often confused with changing code. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Design to delete and rebuild stacks often. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Improve from the previous management style rely on system admins. ### 45. Strict control of your application infrastructure **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ethan V. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like the ablility to define everything about the infrastructure so that I can iteratively refine each component. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Working with the YAML or JSON templates can be daunting. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Launching the complete application with the ability to tear down. ### 46. Some experience **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Amy T. | DevOps, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's pretty comprehensive when doing full stack **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Roll back is always the problem. Sometimes need to spend time to track back where it failed and clean up. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** deploiy full stack ### 47. Building on demand infrastructure through Cloud Formation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sabitha M. | Senior System Analyst, Biotechnology, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloud formation helps one to put infrastructure as code .Individual Amazon resource can be put together as code in cloud formation template and create infrastructure with minimum effort and within time. Cloud formation template is easily understandable , it is written in json or yaml. Once cloud formation template is launched it shows user to select parameters from console. These parameters are defined in cloud formation templates . User can build complex infrastructure through CFT's and easily viewed on cloud formation services on AWS.If stack deployment is failed cloud formation template has capability to roll out the infrastructure and user can select to delete. User can easily update the new changes to existing stack through update option , if any failures stack with automatic roll out and delete the new changes which reduces lot of time on individual user to check . Errors can be easily view on the console, resource creation can be view and directly linked to the resources. Output of cloud formation can be configured in templates so that new user can able to understand what as configured. Using CFT user can create IAM roles,policies, Auto scaling group,Elastic load balancers and application code can be excuted when instance is getting started or at boot time through User data. User can automate application deployment through user date and make common tools available while bringing up the service. Cloud formation is easily integrated with Jenkins for automation and errors can ve validated through error state codes through aws cli commands so that one can view the status onJenkins. Charges are applicable for the resource usage **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** writing conditions is little difficult in cloud formation templates **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Recommened **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solved manual effort to create infrastructure in repeatable manner.User can build their own VPC, Instances,Autoscaling groups, And new IAM roles with small change in code And new instances are having common tools tools installed before they start using through USer data.On the AWS cloud formation control every one can sed the resources created as part of stack creation and see who has access to what ### 48. Revolution **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eric Y. | Architect , Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Infrastructure as code. Period. A must have **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Steep learning curve and felt that training from Amazon was only option. Worth it though **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Data center consolidated and it automation ### 49. Overall good experience with Cloudformation **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ability to setup infrastructure using code under version control. Ability to easily provision stacks in a reproducible process **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I dislike that when features are added to AWS there is a delay on when the features become available to Cloudformation. Documentation clearly defining when existing AWS tools are not available would be helpful. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Provisioning environments in reproducible manner that eliminates manual steps and human error. ### 50. Mandatory **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Michael H. | Senior DevSecOps Consultant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Rolling out large applications in one go **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Obtuse syntax of templates and rollback cam be frustrating **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Complex multi tier applications now are managed in one layer ## AWS CloudFormation Discussions - [Should I use CloudFormation?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/should-i-use-cloudformation) - [Which are characteristics of the CloudFormation service?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/which-are-characteristics-of-the-cloudformation-service) - [What is AWS CloudFormation?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-aws-cloudformation) - [What is AWS CloudFormation used for?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-aws-cloudformation-used-for) - [View AWS CloudFormation pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-aws-cloudformation/reviews?login_required=true&page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-09+07%3A01%3A22+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=d355f85d-84f5-4f8e-8ea2-7c9334cd7d38&secure%5Btoken%5D=596bbd4f7f517409be1028b98a55d7137f3ecab30599a91d08f9c9332bd91726&format=llm_user) ## AWS CloudFormation Integrations - [Amazon Aurora](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-aurora/reviews) - [Amazon DocumentDB](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-documentdb/reviews) - [Amazon DynamoDB](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-web-services-aws-amazon-dynamodb/reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-container-service-amazon-ecs/reviews) - [Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-elastic-kubernetes-service-amazon-eks/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Email Service (Amazon SES)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-email-service-amazon-ses/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Notification Service (SNS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-notification-service-sns/reviews) - [Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-queue-service-sqs/reviews) - [Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-virtual-private-cloud-amazon-vpc/reviews) - [AWS Cloud9](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud9/reviews) - [AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK)](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-cloud-development-kit-aws-cdk/reviews) - [AWS Elastic Beanstalk](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-elastic-beanstalk/reviews) - [AWS Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/reviews) - [SimpleDB](https://www.g2.com/products/simpledb/reviews) ## AWS CloudFormation Features **Administration ** - Administration Console - Task Management - Dashboards and Visualizations - Access Control **Automation** - Test Automation - Intelligent Automation - Release Automation - Automated Provisioning **IT Management** - Workflow Management - Infrastructure Management - IT Discovery ## Top AWS CloudFormation Alternatives - [Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/red-hat-ansible-automation-platform/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (369 reviews) - [Google Cloud Deployment Manager](https://www.g2.com/products/google-cloud-deployment-manager/reviews) - 4.6/5.0 (26 reviews) - [Azure Automation](https://www.g2.com/products/azure-automation/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (32 reviews)