--- title: AWS CloudFormation Reviews meta_title: 'AWS CloudFormation Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 213 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: 213 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-17' 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:** 213 ## 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. AWS Cloudformation enhances the Enterprise Landing Zone for Financial Services **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consulting | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 23, 2024 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The dynamic nature of AWS CloudFormation is a major strength as it can be easily integrated to other services **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Could be difficult to implement if you are not a technical hands on expert **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It was used to enhance the Enterprise Landing Zone for Financial Services in the Organisation with full integration of the technology control library ### 2. Infra provisioning is easy than before **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS cloudformation is easy to use and can easily setup cloud infra in a easy way where we have to write the details of service. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It is a good product when our architure is limited to aws only but when we want to use it for multi arch then we have to use orher product. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Lot of problems are getting solved as we have dev staging and prod infra setup separately which costs more if we keep using it parallely. So it's better to provision infra with CF whenever it is needed. ### 3. Very Convenient To develop AWS Infra, If you are using only AWS Services **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 16, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Easy to Develop through AWS CDK. Easy to maintain. Supports all major programming languages. Can be integrated to git pipelines, very Convinent to auto deploy changes on code merge. Easy to debug. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Can only be used to develop AWS Infrastructure, is not flexible like terraform. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Develops and maintains AWS Infrastructure through cloudformation. one stop solution to maintain AWS Infrastructure. ### 4. AWS Cloud formation outline **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dayalan T. | Cloud Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS cloud native service which benefits the version control, code reuse, and reproducibility to infrastructure management. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Error messages populates on during template validation may not always be very descriptive, making it challenging to pinpoint issues **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** CloudFormation provides detailed logs and metrics to help troubleshoot and optimize deployments, also allows users to version control, code reuse, and reproducibility to infrastructure management. ### 5. AWS helps us keep on Track **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex T. | M, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The reliability is bar none. Company wide use was a no brainer. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There is nothing I dislike. Everyone using it loves it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It is hosting our tracking and other cloudbased services offered. ### 6. Infrastructure automation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 11, 2024 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's ability to provide clean syntax to create AWS resources and integration with almost all the AWS services. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I find custom resources provisioning through CFN is a bit complicated. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ability to provision entire infrastructure environment by maintaining the configurations in a code file. ### 7. Cloudformation for automation of infra **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ranjan Y. | Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 07, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** the best part it is that it functions as api driven and can automate the infrastructure. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** we dont have any limitation here.there is nothing to be disliked. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** it basically used to create infrastructure for any application.it can be provied with the help of code and grt resouces like ec2,s3 bucket,IAM,database,vpc etc ### 8. streamlining infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 03, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** There are many wonderful things about that few of them would be 1-IaC 2-Automation 3-Resource dependency management 4-Rollback and drift detection 5-Tamplents 6-Integration 7-scalability 8-change managment **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** not much it has a great algorithm that nothing could be disliked **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aws cloudformation solves several key problem related to infrastructure provisioning and managment in cloud computing environment and it helps me with IaC dependency managment change management scalability ### 9. Best Infrastructure as Code (IaC) services in market **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** krishna h. | Application Development Senior Analyst, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 04, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The way AWS Cloudformation allows to provision and manage various resources within AWS is too good. Basic templates are readily available to get you started with the resource of your choice **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There is nothing to dislike about this service. At times, depending on your needs of infrastructure, there is a chance you get lost in the ocean of services and templates that are available **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Mostly I had to deploy and maintain every resource I needed for my applications before I was introduced to AWS cloudformation and regularly, I made mistakes regularly. But since I started using this service, there is no way I miss out on resources while configuring different stages like dev, test, prod, etc. ### 10. Very good IaaC service **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 05, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Very easy to use, I really like the UI and the designer feature. It also gives us the possibility to safely update stacks lifecycle. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There's pretty much nothing that I dislike about AWS CloudFormation. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easily replicate different environnement using variables. ### 11. It was really good **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Srijan C. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 09, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The performance of the process is quick. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The complex syntax make it difficult for beginners to understand. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy of implementation of ideas. ### 12. Best IaaC for AWS **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul S. | Devops engineer, Construction, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Doing manual efforts to create sevices/resources was very time consuming & prone to errors. To automate all this things, cloudformation comes in picture, if you are AWS Cloud user. It has very good documentation, that all we need as a beginner. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It uses yaml files to make our work simple, also strictly follow indentation, so sometime writing file becomes over head, but once we write the file, it makes everything simpler. Job becomes easy! **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are just using cloudformation to automate manual efforts to create same thing again and again manually, it saves time and any manual efforts error. And also we are using AWS, so it becomes cloud native solution for us. ### 13. Awesome AWS Cloud Formation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** aswath k. | System Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 18, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Easy to create AWS resource with single piece of code. Able to automate creation of AWS resources for different environments in a project. This eliminate error done manually by operations **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Only available for AWS resource, Debugging cloudfromation is little bit tough because of no proper integration with IDE **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It help us to automate different env say testing env, staging env and production env. So it is very easy for us to create automated testing with Ci integration. ### 14. Deploying AWS Lambda automatically using CloudFormation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Saketh K. | Data Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 20, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to automate the process of deploying Lambda into AWS cloud, which helps in CI/CD; we can download the sample template file from AWS console to start with, atleast for Lambda **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The documentation can be improved. For example consider a usecase where we want to schedule Lambda. We have documentation, but there are multiple ways of doing this (integrating Lambda with Events in template.yaml) and I don't think all ways are documented at a single place. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We frequently update our source code for Lambda functions, and push changes to git; we have a requirement of deploying Lambda on the go instead of manually opening AWS console & uploading a ZIP; CloudFormation is handy for this use case. ### 15. One of the best features of AWS to mange the Infra **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yusuf D. | IT Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 09, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** As its part of AWS, It easy to mange and troubleshoot and getting support from AWS.The best part is you get pre-defined template and its supporrt both Yaml and Json.You can create a an entire infrastructure with just one file. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Not easy to start working on it.Some service are not supported.Use cases and documents need to be more understandable. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Help me to deploy the infrastructure without any hassle and save time by skipping the manual configure on each services.Able to manage most of the service by it. ### 16. AWS CloudFormation works well for our organization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Josh B. | S, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 17, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** We can leverage CloudFormation templates for provisioning our infrastructure. These templates can be reused or modified as needed. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** There are other options like Pulumi and TerraForm that provide additional features and options that we'd like to leverage at times. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** AWS CloudFormation allows for reproducible infrastructure and consistency. ### 17. The best AWS feature for integrating third party Apps **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Airin J. | Technology Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 21, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The complete automation tool, we have automated our environment with this tool and integrated with other third party applications. High scalable and secure for infrastructure. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** This tool is limited to AWS platform level infra only, can't use it for server internal configurations purposes or hybrid cloud. The charges are little higher. When it is consider for new establishments. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The automation of our infrastructure is the most important part for me. And the scalability and other applications integration really worth for us. The tool really benefited for us. ### 18. A pleasant experience using AWS cloud formation! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Online Media | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It is a helpful resource to get an insight on all the tasks and helps manage them to get completed. Creating and deleting of tasks is a more easy process as it gives a centralised navigation. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Nothing to dislike that I have experienced so far. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helped manage our entire cloud footprint along with security. The scheduler is one of the key factors that helps Excel this tool. Automation and integration is super easy. ### 19. Good standard tool for AWS **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alex P. | DevOps engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 05, 2023 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's the simplest way to deploy or manage AWS infrastructure resources in your infra as a code. It's built into AWS, and you do not have to do much in order to make it work. The modular design of it lets to write simple logic **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Size limits, difficult to implement non usual, production logic, almost zero modularization, bad community support and pretty poor documentation **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure as a code ### 20. CloudFormation is great for small-to-medium scale implementations **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Relatively easy to understand and write up. The editor is readily available in AWS Console. Massive adoption by 3rd-party tools, agents and integrations. Straightforward template management. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Implementation at scale can be troublesome. Multi-account templating is virtually impossible. Version control is not supported. CloudFormation is hard to combine with other automation, in most cases the choice is either CF or other automation like Terraform, Ansible, ArgoCD, Atlantis, etc. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us with small-scale automation jobs, i.e. agent onboarding, integration with a 3rd-party tool, etc. In most cases, it's a copy-paste process that can be delegated to less senior staff. ### 21. Reviewing AWS CloudFormation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bhavuk M. | AWS/DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 03, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** YAML used to write statements is easy to learn. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The template designer is not user-friendly. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps us to automate infrastructure deployment and lets us save time and effort. ### 22. Best service for managing your cloud resources. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Raghavendra L. | Cloud Enginner, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** To build and deploy an application on the cloud we need many resources, and managing those resources is another kind of task. AWS Cloudformation has helped many of us to manage the resources required to build an application. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** to build an infrastructure for an application that is to be deployed on the cloud you need to have a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) understanding and if your infrastructure designer is not familiar with this, it becomes a tedious task for him to handle. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** AWS Cloudformation is solving the business continuity issues for many organizations around the globe. with simple steps you can create templetes of your application and can deploy it in the regions nearer to your target customers. ### 23. One of the best IaaS for AWS services **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS CloudFormation got all the amazing features that are supported by many DevOps tools and frameworks where the infrastructural resources can be created from code files. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Feature-wise, AWS CloudFormation has nothing to complain about. But this will be only used for the AWS resource side of things. when you work with hybrid cloud solutions you have to have separate terraform or similar code files individually. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I would recommend IaaS for any kind of cloud-native solution. So in that line, AWS CloudFormation is the choice of preference for AWS resource management. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** At our organization, we use AWS CloudFormation in almost all our digital solutions where AWS services have been utilized. CloudFormation helps us to maintain all our infrastructure as code files so that we can reuse it to migrate environments very easily. At the same time, we were able to save a lot of time by reusing a few templates. ### 24. Easy tool to automate entire infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kavya P. | Technical Solutions Analyst, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 31, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It helps create and build an entire infra setup and provision resources within minutes. It is easy to use the same stack to create another similar environment. Rolling back is easy and it deletes the entire stack, so you don’t have to worry about the cleanup or stale resources in the environment. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It requires dependency on the AWS environment, you cannot use it beyond that. In a few cases, when resources (sec groups or subnets) are stuck upon rollback, you may have to manually find and delete them. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I automated my entire network and infra setup within minutes for a web application environment. It is one time work on the stack, but it really saves a lot of time in the Long run. ### 25. Infra-Provisioning made Exceptional with cloud formation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Industrial Automation | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS cloud formation offers a spectacular tool to build and provision my organisation infrastructure requirements. It provides a feature of automation with various devops tool seamleassly. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It can provide a integration with IDE tools like vs code for even simple interface. Need support for multi cloud infrastructure configurstions like terraform tool. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** AWS cloud formation is easy for creating it's own project infrastructure. It is very easy to use and maintain. Just in one click we can create the infrastructure. ### 26. Helpful Cloudformation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** All the pre-existing templates are beneficial in configuring the needed services in a quicker time. All I have to do is upload the template, input the necessary parameters and hit submit. All the services get deployed and configured. Another feature about the cloud formation I like the most is the roll-back feature. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The only thing is don't like about the Cloud Formation is sometimes the stack gets stuck without showing any error, and we have to wait until the stack fails. Also, whenever the stack fails, there is no easy option to modify the parameters and restart them. We need to delete the stack and recreate them. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Anything kind of service that I repeat in all our environments gets deployed through the cloud formation templates. For example, the IAM roles and policies, which are identical for every AWS account, get deployed through the Cloud formation template that we have created. ### 27. Best IAC tool aws cloud formation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 11, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Aws cloud formation is one of the best ANS tool. you can create your entire infrastructure with the single file called templates. Tamples are written in a yaml and json file. Easy to configure. Also pre defined templates are very useful for the beginners. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It is difficult for the beginners. Changing the name may cause the deleting of the data. Out of synchronisation issue will come if you do some changes from console. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Best to use with yaml file. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using AWS cloud formation for creating our project infrastructure. It is very easy to configure and maintain. Only on a single click all the infrastructure gets created. Also have a large community support is also very helpful. ### 28. CloudFormation: IaC for AWS Environment **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pranay J. | Senior DevOps Consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 15, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** 1. Tons of pre-configured templates available for quick deployment 2. Can be used for creating Infra, Pipelines, and Clusters 3. Supports both JSON and YAML for templates 4. Can easily rollback to the previous state in case of errors **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** 1. Limited only for AWS environments 2. Writing custom templates is a bit tough as compared to writing templates for Terraform 3. Knowledge base could be improved **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use AWS as our primary cloud service provider so creating infra and services manually is hectic and inconsistent. With CloudFormation we are able to write templates for the desired infra and implement them in multiple projects. ### 29. The best tool for automation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kamlesh K. | Technical Team Lead, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 15, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The easy ways to automate an architecture **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Well nothing as of now, didn't find anything bad about it **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The best and fastest way to deploy applications ### 30. Senior DevOps Engineer **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Praveen K. | SDE-3, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 17, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Once you create the cloud formation template, then in a single click, it will make the complete infrastructure. You don't need to do any manual things to develop your infra **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Some of the features are missing in cloud formation, like custom security group creation with the Instance creation **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** yes, for infra automation, you can consider this **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** To clone one infrastructure to other environments, you need to pass some inputs value, and then it will clone your full infra ### 31. Impressive IaaS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vithushan S. | Co-Founder, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 18, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS Cloudformation brings very good features to the table, My favorite is the support to almost all the IaaS tools such as Serverless Framework, Terraform, etc. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** In terms of the feature set, It got most of the fundamentals covered. But I have experienced few usability issues. For example, when I delete a stack sometimes it is stuck in a loading status without giving any error desccritions. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** When it comes to managing AWS Resources from IaaS, CloudFormation adds a lot of value. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** As a software vendor, we heavily use AWS cloud technologies. Therefore we do a lot of infrastructure as a part of our solution. So, Cloudformation helps to improve our resource management within AWS. ### 32. Cloud formation can be easy to built an app. **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Complete control over stack and to build services easily and faster. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I cannot share any module with anyone online. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building stack for api services and to nurture the app. ### 33. Forming the cloud at ease **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 01, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** With cloud formation, it is easy to set up the complete infrastructure just with code. Also, the code can be written in either JSON or YAML, which makes it more handy. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The only thing which makes cloud formation lagging behind the terraform is the support for some security policies & permissions. It does follows IAM authentication that's what makes it more AWS dependent. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Highly recommended **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The major problem previously we have was to manage & to remember the complete infrastructure setup inclusive of storage, compute, networking etc. & It required many skilled labours, now it has been solved by this infrastructure as a code service. ### 34. Cloud formation for any type of cloud stack **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** lakhan p. | Solution Delivery Consultant, Management Consulting, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 16, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ease at which one can create a cloud stack for different applications, data pipelines, and cloud workload infrastructure. Cloud formation not only helps you set up infrastructure but also takes care of the proper security and roles needed. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloud formation has a slight learning curve to get it right. Yaml is easy to understand, so keep playing around with sample YAMLs available for different cloud stacks to get the hang of all significant components you should configure to bring your application cloud stack up and running. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using cloud formation to spin up web applications on a serverless cloud stack. We use the combination of API gateway, Lambda, RDS, cloud watch, IAM roles as resource types. Following are the significant problems that cloud formation help us solve: 1. it enables the easy replication of cloud stack for different client instances 2. it enables easy upgrades and rollouts for all the client instance in terms of infrastructure and application version 3. it enables easy to tear down client instance whenever needed with a click of a button ### 35. Easiest way to create Streaming Cluster **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hamit D. | Marketing Specialist, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I am using it to create a clustering solution for my streaming needs. It is really fast and easy to use! **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Actually nothing. I like it and keep using it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** As I said the best part is it is really easy to use and it is really fast to configure. ### 36. Convert your infrastructure into code! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It is an alternative for Terraform, another powerful tool for setting up cloud infrastructure. Let's say you have to have multiple environments for your application (app / website), and you want to have identical cloud infrastructure across all the environments. One way of doing this is you duplicate your effort and create the cloud resources manually for each environment. The other way of doing this is, is you write the CloudFormation yaml file only once and create all the resouces through the cloudformation template for all the environment. This is a widely accepted approach in the industry and is considered a best practice. The other best thing i like about cloudformation is the design tool. When you're done creating the yaml file, you can view the high level architecture of the resources created, in the form of a design diagram. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The learning curve! Although its possible to create all cloud resources through the yaml file, i feel like a lot more needs to be done in this area to make it more simpler and more accessible to a large number of users who are not technically sound. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Cloudformation or terraform is now considered a best practice ( you're essentially converting your infrastructure into code using cloudformation) . If you know how to use it, then definitely go for this. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** 1. You can view the system architecture diagram provided by AWS when you create cloud resources through cloudformation. 2. You can create resources in the cloud through code instead of creating them manually through the GUI. ### 37. AWS Cloudformation - Infrastructure as Code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 07, 2022 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Using Cloudformation, we don't need to create the resources manually. Changes to the infrastructure are reviewed through YAML code. Using Cloudformation, We can easily destroy and re-create an infrastructure on the cloud on the fly. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** As of now, there are no downsides and dislikes for this product **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** For Dev environment as well, we have all the resources running in the cloud 24*7. Using AWS Cloudformation, we have automated the deletion of templates in the evening and recreated the resources in the morning. Through this process, overall cost has been reduced. We can estimate the costs of your resources using Cloudformation templates. ### 38. AWS CloudFormation Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kushal P. | Lead Engineer - Full Stack, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 25, 2021 ### 39. Easy and useful to provision AWS Infrastructure. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pratik B. | Solutions Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 15, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The best thing about AWS Cloud formation is the supportability for JSON and YAML which is very easy to understand and learn. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It doesn't track the resources which are manually deleted and hence there is inconsistency sometimes. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If your infrastructure is AWS native, you can use AWS cloudformation for provisioning **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use AWS cloud formation for provisioning repetitive infrastructure and also it avoids human error in infrastructure configuration. It integrates seamlessly with other AWS services like AWS IAM. The templates for aws cloudformation can be made dynamic with real-time inputs which can be used for many departments. ### 40. Fine tool for IaC on AWS **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arpit S. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 22, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's simple to set up and maintain AWS resources. It has a rollback feature. It also allows you to see the changes that will be made when changesets are used. The feature of nested Stack is also nice. cfn-init, cfn-signal gives us the add-on features to user-data scripts. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** When executing the Cloudformation stacks, the error messages can be difficult to understand. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Using Cloudformation, I manage all of the resources that are deployed on AWS. Cloudformation makes it simple to create, update, and delete resources.. ### 41. AWS Cloudformation - One click Setup **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 09, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloudformation has lot of features which faciliates user to setup envs easily and quickly. A wide variety of sample templates are avaialble too. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloudformation has its own limitations with few of the services on AWS, which makes it a little incomplete. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** When there are a lot of environments to be setup as part of migration or initial setup for a project, preparing cloudformation templates helps alot, both in terms of time and effort. The templates are reusable across projects too with minimum changes. ### 42. AWS CloudFormation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Electronics | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 08, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS CloudFormation is the best tool for deploying my client package, especially my AWS CloudFormation template has things to configure Lambda, Sagemaker etc. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Still configuring the AWS CloudFormation template is difficult, need simple UI for integrating services like AWS lambda ,Pagemaker & AWS IoT **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using AWS CloudFormation templates to deploy client project, when my client finishes registration ### 43. AWS cloud formations .. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 05, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Lots of templates and snippets are easily available Can integrate and enhance work with other DevOps tools. Infrastructure as code is automation. Requires to integrate provisioning into CI/CD Formalize manual provisioning. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Knowledge of provisioning AWS services is a must to use CloudFormation in a serious way. Lack of guidance on how to keep CF code clear and clean Resilience - building resources in multiple availability zones etc **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use to create our cluster. ### 44. Very good tool **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishnu V. | Staff Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 23, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Support for multiple languages like typescript, python, etc **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** and we cannot configure all of the services in AWS using cloud formation **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Without logging into the AWS website we can configure the services using terminal ### 45. Great service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 01, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** To be able to have a clean way of recreating and destroying resources **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It is challenging to set dependencies between 2 stacks **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Almost all our services ### 46. AWS native Infrastructure as Code (IaC) **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aaron A. | Systems Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 09, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation makes it possible to develop entire environments within YAML or JSON configuration files, and then use the same file over and over again across accounts. This allows engineers/architects to deploy consistent, repeatable infrastructure. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Some of the documentation is not very clear. This makes it harder to write resource statements for certain services, for example, Lambda. Also, some services are not supported in CloudFormation. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I am using it to solve the problem of inconsistent VPCs, security groups, and EC2 instances. I have realized saved time in provisioning resources. Also, improved ability to troubleshoot problems and security too. CloudFormation has greatly improved our workflow. ### 47. Automate infra provision through cloudformation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 15, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It is a quick solution to provision aws infrastructure using a json or yaml script. The same script can be reuse in multiple aws accounts. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Preparation of cloudformation templates take a lot of time and efforts. There should be an easy solution to check the CF template locally before executing it. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are using cloudformation stacks for provisioning the aws infrastructure through a single click. Most of the templates are reusable, for example, network template. ### 48. Thanks to CloudFormation, resources in code is keeping everything clean and robust **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 08, 2021 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Two things I like the most about CloudFormation: 1- Keep everything in the code where you can see all your resources and connections between them 2- If you delete the resources from the template, they are also deleted in AWS **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It is very easy to have a long, unreadable template when your number of resources increase. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** I would suggest grouping relevant resources together in different files and merge them in the main template so that template files don't get bigger and unmanageable. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We don't anymore manage resources manually from AWS Console, and keep every connected resources in one template. It make deployments easier and faster as well. ### 49. CloudFormation build a new environment while you make a cuppa **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2020 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloudformation is a great way to deploy all of your infrastructure as code, this code is as either json or yaml templates, it enables you to be able to version control on your solution and being able to share it with more people so they are able to use these templates to build out a solution for testing. you are able to reference loads of different AWS services within these templates **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** not all services are fully added yet, we are having a issue with codedeploy where you can't do a blue/green deployment with EC2, we're having to come up with a solution around this which takes alot more time to get set up, also the AWS documents are that go they give you the basics of what you need to do but you do find yourself going in circles trying to find a solution **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** we want to be able to deploy our solution quickly in case of a disaster in one of the AWS regions so we can lift and shift the solution we provide to another region making sure we keep downtime to a minimum ### 50. 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.. ## 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?page=2§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-18+13%3A05%3A33+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=940f2286-9985-4dc0-a729-fd2770caa8e4&secure%5Btoken%5D=295782da2df7e692524ab2e9065ecd8c05f52f9176aa293a419ee1215d2ea773&format=llm_user) ## AWS CloudFormation Integrations - [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 Glue](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-glue/reviews) - [AWS Lambda](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-lambda/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)