--- 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: '2026-07-21' 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. An integral resource for teams in shared development environments **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Consumer Goods | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Cloudformation has allowed my team to develop worry free in shared development environments, which had previously been an impassible hurdle in our process. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It can be difficult to visualize, especially for newcomers. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Don't try to use this product without reading about it first. This is an approachwhich works well for many products, but not this one. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** This is covered above :) ### 2. Not the best code around **Rating:** 2.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Miguel A. | DevOps Enginner, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to create infrastructure as code. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Code is harsh, relies too much in bash commands. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Have a look to Terraform **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure creation and maintenance ### 3. Makes life easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I really like how clodformation can deploy my apllications in a flash **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The editor on line is not user friendly and I find it hard to use **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Don't hesitate start using it today **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I wanted to be able to deploy my solutions in a consistand Repeatable fashion. Cloudformation allows me to do this and makes my customers lives very easy. . ### 4. Infrastructure as Code. Great, but there is a learning curve. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dan O. | Managing Director, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 28, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It's effectively a documented build sheet, except all of your infrastructure can be built automatically from code. Cloudformation is able to setup resources across the AWS stack and across all regions, it's free and you only pay for the resources that you use/deploy. It can be managed from a CLI or API. Code (JSON) can be built from a drag and drop GUI or by hand. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Whilst you can export the output values of a stack, you can't export the Cloudformation script of the infrastructure that you have built. Whilst Cloudformation will help you create and provision infrastructure, you've still got to build and deploy the applications on those infrastructures - it's only part of the puzzle of tools that you'll need to gain familiar with on the AWS stack. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automatic creation of website infrastructure, provides the ability to build an instance for development work to proceed and stop using it overnight thus lowering the overall hosting cost. ### 5. Convenient **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew P. | Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Great service that allows us to manage our cloud infstraucture. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I don't dislike anything about this service. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Managing cloud infratructure. ### 6. CloudFormation Review **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Relatively light learning curve to begin using **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Not enough error checking and guardrails. It is possible for a deployment to pass tests but fail in deployment **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Do a bakeoff with Terraform too. Worth the effort **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deploying infrastructure, particularly Storage Gateway via CI/CD pipelines. We could easily and quickly automate the deployment of a storage gateway and volumes. ### 7. CloudFormation Review **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Declaratively defining infrastructure. 'deploy' command either creates a new stack OR updates an existing stack, making deployments idempotent. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** JSON syntax is difficult to use. Needs better support for querying or referencing existing resources in the account **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Ability to define aws infrastructure as code is critical to reproducible environments and ensuring that new deployments will function as intended. ### 8. IaC Dream **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Love that the service stays up to date with released features in the rest of AWS ecosystem. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It doesn't have itterative constructs for ranges of resources all configured similarly. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Use the resource reference in the documentation! **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Codifying my infrastructure. Checking deployed stacks against the template (drift). Gained confidence that the infrastructure is sound and peer reviewed. ### 9. Love the idea of Infra as code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Its such a great tool to automate my infra deployments especailly with Yaml support. Glad to see the new CF drift feature. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Took a little while to get started with. But i'm getting more comfortable now. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I can see the infra components as codable objects which saves lot of time to create test enviroments and test. ### 10. Reliable, repeatable deployments **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Telecommunications | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Being able to describe the desired state configuration of the resources I need to deploy, so the process can be easily repeated. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Difficulty in performing more complex tasks. Would like to be able to run scripts easily to further customize deployments. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Giving customers an easy way to deploy the product after they have purchased it. ### 11. cloudformations saving may work life and work time **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** SO much easier to have a 1 step process to build enviornments and spin of servers with software **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It takes a little time to get used to it. Its user friendly but you need to know what you are looking for. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** simplifing the ability to spin up full environments at the click of a button. ### 12. Very Good Service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** With CloudFormation you have the ability to very easily destroy and re-create your stacks, which is fantastic in many scenarios: creating dev/staging environments, creating local developer environments... **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Recently-released resources are not always immediately available to be used in CloudFormation. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to create different environments: it saves time when having to replicate them. ### 13. CloudFormation Review **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like the IAAC capabilities of cloudformation. This has allowed my team to check in code and act like a development team. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The only thing I dislike is that sometimes new services take a while to get into the platform. It seems that even terraform gets them before cloudformation. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure as code. ### 14. Efficient and Functional **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like that I can create and modify infrastructure quickly and efficiently with CF. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I do not like that when changing a stack it does not pull in past configurations as the defaults. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Quickly and efficiently creating clusters to manage infrastructure. This makes it so everything is the same quickly. ### 15. Not Comprehensive **Rating:** 2.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Insurance | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 26, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Works well with AWS. Best product to use for infrastructure as code in AWS, **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Very sequential. It is unable to figure out the sequence of steps if they are out of order in the code. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Make is more robust like Terraform **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Implement infrastructure as code for our devops pipeline. ### 16. Infrastructure as Code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The best part is having to configure infrastructure as code and have a ci/cd pipeline to execute changes on an on-going basis. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** With the new feature of figuring out the drift, its best product out there in the market. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** NA **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Configuring everything as code. ### 17. aws cloudformation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Internet | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The ability to use json or yaml and there are additional languages which will translate code to json or yaml **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** lack of intuitive or "smart" json parsing **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Learn all of the tips and tricks. There are a bunch of pitfalls, but most are surmountable. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** infrastructure as code ### 18. Cloud Frmation Makes it Easy to get Solutions to my Customers **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I can provide pre-configured, easy to use solutions for F5 customers - so they can try out our technology on AWS with minimum setup times **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Occasional complexity - sometimes it can be confusing when starting out. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easy creation of complex application secuirty configurations using F5 products ### 19. I like cloudformation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Infrastructure as code, cli scripting, insight to resources and statuses **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Sometimes refresh button does not work, could enable auto cleanup if all resources have been deleted **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Use a tool, any tool, to manage infrastructure **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Aws cloudformation allows us to reliably deploy infrastructure to multiple environments ### 20. Allows us to stand up new environments at click of a button **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Biggest win is the ability to stand up and down new environments for experimentation **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Updating CF scripts is a bit complicated, there is a UI to review your CF but it is not very intuitive **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our entire infrastructure is built on the CloudFormation script ### 21. Cloud Formation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** its an amazing product, it made easy to deploy and maintain all your plataform **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** nothing :) the product its amazing, we will migrate from chef to cloud formation **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** improve the agility of deploys, configure vpc, deploy servers, create autoscaling groups , loadbalancers. ### 22. AWS Infrastructure As Code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Aviation & Aerospace | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Defining everything in a single template that can be easily deployed, updated and deleted **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Not all services are supported by cloudformation and the level of granuarity controls available for IAM granted access **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Consistent deployment of infrastructure across multiple accounts ### 23. Easy and free **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Defense & Space | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Free solution that plugins in natively to AWS with easy configuration. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** YAML and JSON can be a little tricky - not all features are available in CF. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deployment of standardized IAM and monitoring templates to our various accounts. ### 24. CF Review **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Biotechnology | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** This is the best infrastructure as code which can build enitre platform in minutes **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** parameter limitation is sixty, it would be great if we can get rid of this limit **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** na **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** quick provisioning of infrastructure stack very quick ### 25. best way to create resource on aws **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?** programmaing way of codeing and nested stacks for bringing up multiple clusters **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** sometimes it will take long time to get the features on cloudformation than external solutions like terraform **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** quick way to spin up stacks for load testings. ### 26. Get it done in seconds! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 04, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The feature to get your template in a markup language **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Theresn't a single template to get all done, theres multiple tabs and it makes the interface hard to understand. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Get production and staging enviroments quick ### 27. Speedup integration new features **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Best tool for deploy infrastructure in AWS **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It takes too long to integrate new features that are already available in the SDK. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use CFN to describe and deploy our infastructure in multiple environment. Infrastructure as a Code. ### 28. Love it **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I think this is one of the best tools that AWS has and I continually use this tool **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I think the template designer could be a bit more rfriendly to use **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Creating entire AWS resources and infrastucture ### 29. Cloudformation **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Nanotechnology | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** We use cloudformation stacks for our deployments. It is easy to use and helps automating the whole deployment process. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I Didnt see anything that I didnt dislkie so far. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deployment automation.It reduces the provisioning overhead ### 30. Simple deployment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** We save countless hours connecting our customers AWS accounts to CloudHealth for cost optimization. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Understanding of the syntax can be tricky. Too many brackets and it gets confusing. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Time saving and thus money saved. ### 31. CloudFormation.... I Like it **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Retail | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** as We can define entire stake as a file. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Boiler plate code... Need some other tool like terraform to generate this **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Defining entire Environment as a file, Doing operations againt entire satck ### 32. Great way to provision IAC! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** easy to deploy templates throught the AWS console **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** its difficult to make updates once you start nesting templates **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** deploying IAC is really easy. no mistakes when you deploy templates many times ### 33. Deploying the applications in one shot !! **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The way in which the app is setting up the supporting components is impressive **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The time taken for whole setup has to be tuned up **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Any lambda service and lexbot service ### 34. More support on stackset **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Multiple account multiple region deployment **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Create change set on each stack instance before Drift detection on whole stackset Update stackset on console without update stack instance **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** In fracture provision and management ### 35. Cloud Formation **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** The usability of the templates The ease of redeployment **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** It would be ideal to leverage cloud formation across multiple cloud providers **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Building multiple environments for multiple clients ### 36. Simplifies repeation **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?** CF simplifies and quickens the setup of multiple accounts and environments **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** The validation provided by the cli could be be improved **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Consistent setup of environments ### 37. CloudFormation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Nanotechnology | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to deploy infrastructure quickly and easy. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** If your CF template fails you have to re-enter all the information, nothing is saved. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Deploying infrastructure ### 38. Excellent thing to have entire Infrastrcuture as a Code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 27, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Highly configurable and easy to write templates **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Need better documentation for template keys. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We already have our entire AWS infrastructure setuped using cloudformation templates. ### 39. AWS CloudFormation **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 30, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation makes it easy to define Cloud Resources and perform consistent automation by creating resources via CloudFormation instead of manually creating things each time. It supports both JSON & YAML which is nice as well. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** While easy to use, digging down to finding the CloudFormation template documentation can be rather annoying- it's a bit hidden on the AWS website. But once you bookmark it, you're set! **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Automation needs & it has saved us time and effort by being able to define a resource once and then consistently re-deploy a stack ### 40. Frustrated **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Sports | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Describing infrastructure in a file per service is very handy. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Referencing resources across templates is a pain **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Easily spinning up infrastructure per service ### 41. excellent **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** ability to easily configure infrastructure across accounts **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I would prefer ability to easily add post stack processes **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** building templates for multiple applications ### 42. the only way you should create aws resources **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Transportation/Trucking/Railroad | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** the ability to deploy resources in a repeatable manner **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** until recently no easy way to manage loops **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** repeatable deployments ### 43. basic deployment orchestration service **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Austin C. | Solutions Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Everything can be deployed with cloudformation in an AWS environment. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Communication between cloudformation deployments is growing, but still incomplete. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you're doing deployment orchestration in AWS you will need cloudformation. If you have complicated deployments, you will need some sort of system to augment cloudformation, because it won't cover everything. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Repeatable deployment orchestration in an AWS environment has to be done with cloudformation, and it does a good job of handling it. ### 44. Cloudformation - infrastructure as code **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Duncan H. | Software Engineer / Consultant, Internet, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 13, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Ability to manage our infrastructure in code, keeping it version controlled. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** Some new parts felt a bit clunky, like the ability to export restful swagger for use in the template. Its improving rapidly though! Not a deterrent. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** If you are bound to AWS this is great, if you have plans to move away you could look into Terraform **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Moving this to code has enabled non devops engineers to understand the architecture without having to log into the console. At a high level it provides documentation of the setup. ### 45. Oh my god why? **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2018 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** AWS updates it; supports the latest features **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** My team found that once we started trying to break it apart and make it modular it was difficult to end up with anything that anyone enjoyed working with. We disliked it so much that we ended up writing our own python-based abstraction around it that allowed us to use simple and flat CloudFormation templates and connect them to each other via python code. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Supported by AWS so always up to date. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Infrastructure as Code. Allows us to use version control to store the templates. ### 46. CloudFormation as a virtual applience **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Konstantin V. | Software Development Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 20, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** I like the idea of creating a self-containing CloudFormation templates (with inline Lamnbdas) to solve a business task. Just send CFN template as an attachment to an email. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** I think Amazon should provide a marketplace for pure CloudFormation solutions. So we should be able to sell them and track the usage at the same time. So some surrounding with licensing is required to unfold the whole new market of cloud "paper-based" appliances. Size limit for a CloudFormation template when run within inside a AWS CodePipeline **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** CloudFormation is integral part of server-less Ci/CD on AWS. I would recommend to anyone to use AWS CloudFormation + AWS CodePipeline + AWS CodeBuild stack. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** CloudFormation is a part of our CI/CD strategy; Cloud appliances; ### 47. Creating/Deleting all AWS resources using single service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 28, 2017 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** 1) Cloud Formation has integration support with almost all the AWS services. You can create all the resources you need in one step using a cloud formation template. Deleting the appropriate template will also delete all the resources created by it. This way managing of AWS resources becomes very easy. Without Cloud Formation you have to individually make calls to either create/delete the resource and needs to track the related resources. CloudFormation is good at solving this problem. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** 1) Only JSON support. 2) Lot of eventual consistency issues while deleting some of the AWS resources created using CloudFormation. Need to invoke delete multiple times. 3) Cloud Formation for new services with the launch of new service would be great rather than to wait for sometime. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** 1) If you want to maintain multiple AWS resources at single place cloud formation is the place to go. Its like infrastructure as a code where you can specify all the infrastructure needed to run something as part of single template and let the template create all the resources you need. It also supports parametrization which is helpful for interactions between multiple resources. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** Used this for creating or scaling multiple environments like testing, beta, gamma, prod. Not only creation but tearing down these environments. Used this to setup services running in EC2 with all the VPCs, Security groups, subnets etc. These servers are used to hosting multiple websites. Benefits: 1) Hassle free maintenance of multiple AWS resources using one service. 2) Scaling up/down is super easy with launching new templates or deleting the existing ones. 3) Good support in console with drag and drop support. ### 48. CloudFormation is great but sadly supported only on AWS **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Manil C. | IngĂ©nieur d'affaires, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** It is become more and more difficult to choose the right provisioning tool to build even the relatively complex infrastructure on any Cloud provider. For AWS, what you would be looking for is the ability to provision resources (e.g. EC2, VPC) and the ability to reuse the same configuration to build multiple environments (e.g. development, staging and production). CloudFormation address these two concerns, it is a template driven that can be used to leverage the infrastructure as code paradigm. It is provided by AWS and thus garante the ability to automate the provisioning of any AWS service with their respective latest configuration parameters unlike other tools like terraform that tend to provide generic resource representation despite the target Cloud provider. CloudFormation handles failure nicely, it gives you the possibility to rollback changes to the infrastructure to a last stable configuration. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation is tide to AWS and cannot be used to provision resources on any other Cloud provider. CloudFormation is maintained by Amazon and no community involvement is possible. Also, the templates writing for CloudFormation tend to be too long (it is a JSON document) compared to other tools that provide a concise DSL (Domain Specific Language). Furthermore, some AWS services (especially new one) are not fully supported by the CloudFormation syntax. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** CloudFormation is the right tool for building infrastructures on AWS but if you need a provisioning tool that support multi-cloud environment than it's not the way to go. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were charged by a client to migrate some services from it's own data center to the AWS cloud. The task consisted of building similar environment one for each delivery stage (staging and production). The team was mostly composed of DevOps consultants, a handful of ops guys and a solution architect. We ended up choosing CloudFormation as our migration tool thanks for its deep integration with AWS which made the task less painful for us. ### 49. Great tool for automatically provisioning and deploying your cloud native apps **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sheehan A. | Software Engineering Manager, Pro Team Services, Sports, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 23, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation is a free service that comes with your AWS subscription that allows you to define a template for all of your cloud resources and launch them in a predictable and reliable way. You can write either JSON or YAML to define all of your instances, databases etc. and then launch them into production without having to do any manual operation. This is a great way to start diving into the world of devops and continuous delivery. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation is not as robust as Chef, Terraform or other competitors. Specifically, what you configure is what you ultimately launch. Tools like Terraform will allow you to visualize your "Plan" before you launch it, in case you want to edit it before launching. This makes it easy to prototype and set configurations without having to launch them into production to test. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** You can use other AWS tools such as AWS Config to get a baseline snapshot of your infrastructure. It will create a CloudFormation template for you, and then you can use that baseline to create other cloud formation templates for all of your applications. This will save time, from having to do the initial cloud formation creation up front. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** We are trying to automate the deployment and setup of our cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code. One of the biggest benefits of cloud computing is the ability to instantiate and terminate resources on demand. CloudFormation is a key pillar in providing these setup capabilities through code. ### 50. A powerful tool, broadly applicable to other AWS services **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joshua P. | Systems Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 14, 2016 **What do you like best about AWS CloudFormation?** Nearly every service AWS offers can be enumerated and configured using CloudFormation. For simple syntax checking, JSON is a great format. The available tools for working with CloudFormation templates in IDEs or browser editors is steadily growing, and AWS has released their own visual editing tool which allows less-experienced users to quickly create an environment template and deploy it using CloudFormation. For more advanced users, CloudFormation templates are a powerful and complete means of deploying entire environments in AWS. **What do you dislike about AWS CloudFormation?** CloudFormation does not always receive the very latest features for every AWS service when they are launched. This diminishes the effectiveness of this tool for describing and building entire environments from CloudFormation templates, which can increase the time it takes to perform a rebuild or recovery. **Recommendations to others considering AWS CloudFormation:** Manage your templates in a revision control (source control) system. Ensure any iterative changes or extensions to existing configuration (e.g. new security group rules, new systems, everything really) make it into the appropriate CloudFormation template. Make use of variable declarations and run-time template inputs: do not hard-code resource names or other attributes. You never know when you will want to stand up an exact copy of your environment, and name-space conflicts will prevent you from doing that with CloudFormation! If you have a production environment which leverages more than 1-2 AWS services, but lack hands-on experience with CloudFormation, definitely enlist the expertise of an AWS Certified consultant or an Amazon Partner Network member who has deployed production environments with CloudFormation before. Do not try to enumerate an entire environment in a single template. Instead, use at least one template per AWS service: have a template file solely for each type of resource such as RDS, EC2, VPCs. Subnets and security groups within a VPC should go in the template for that VPC (keep dependent resources together in a single template). If you have resources which may be changed or replaced frequently, separate them from resources that change little and absolutely keep templates for database systems separate from all other resource types. **What problems is AWS CloudFormation solving and how is that benefiting you?** CloudFormation permits the teams we work with to track changes to an environment's infrastructure as code, and provides a simple disaster recovery mechanism in cases where resources might be mistakenly or maliciously deleted. Strictly enforcing infrastructure configuration changes in CloudFormation means we never have to worry about whether a change will persist, and lets us quickly re-deploy entire environments "from scratch" with minimal effort. ## 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=4§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-21+12%3A17%3A27+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=b600d52e-247e-4d99-ba8a-faf968c37c98&secure%5Btoken%5D=116a5d948abc084252516189ae59e8536c1c576730fb8ac5161213e30a992899&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 Redshift](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-redshift/reviews) - [Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-relational-database-service-rds/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 Simple Storage Service (S3)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-simple-storage-service-s3/reviews) - [Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)](https://www.g2.com/products/amazon-virtual-private-cloud-amazon-vpc/reviews) - [AWS Auto Scaling](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-auto-scaling/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 Fargate](https://www.g2.com/products/aws-fargate/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)