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Amazon EC2 Systems Manager VS AWS CloudFormation

Compare Amazon EC2 Systems Manager VS AWS CloudFormation and see what are their differences

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Amazon EC2 Systems Manager logo Amazon EC2 Systems Manager

Learn how to shorten the time to detect and resolve problems. View operational data from multiple AWS services and automate tasks across AWS resources.

AWS CloudFormation logo AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a...
  • Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-30
  • AWS CloudFormation Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

AWS CloudFormation features and specs

  • Infrastructure as Code
    CloudFormation allows you to define your infrastructure using code or templates, promoting version control, reviewability, and collaborative planning.
  • Automated Provisioning
    It automates the provisioning and updating of infrastructure, reducing the manual intervention required and minimizing human errors.
  • Consistency and Repeatability
    Ensures consistent configurations by deploying the same template multiple times across different environments, eliminating configuration drift.
  • Integration with Other AWS Services
    Tightly integrated with other AWS services, allowing for comprehensive infrastructure management, security policies, monitoring and logging.
  • Scalability and Flexibility
    Facilitates easy scaling and modifying of resources according to the application requirements without significant downtime.

Possible disadvantages of AWS CloudFormation

  • Complexity
    Large templates can become complex and difficult to manage, making troubleshooting and updating challenging.
  • Learning Curve
    Requires time and effort to learn and master, especially for newcomers to AWS or Infrastructure as Code (IaC) concepts.
  • Limited Cross-Platform Support
    Primarily tailored for AWS services, with limited support for managing infrastructure on other cloud platforms.
  • State Management
    Managing the state of your infrastructure can be complex, as creating or updating resources is highly dependent on the current state of your stack.
  • Debugging Issues
    Error messages and stack traces can sometimes be cryptic, making it difficult to pinpoint the exact cause of deployment failures.

Analysis of AWS CloudFormation

Overall verdict

  • Good

Why this product is good

  • AWS CloudFormation can be a powerful tool for managing infrastructure as code, allowing you to model and set up your Amazon Web Services resources so that you can spend less time managing those resources and more time focusing on your applications. It provides a consistent, repeatable process for provisioning infrastructure, improves change management, enhances resource tracking, and reduces the possibility of human errors. Additionally, it integrates seamlessly with other AWS services and enables the deployment of infrastructure through code, which can be version controlled, tested, and automated.

Recommended for

  • Organizations that heavily utilize AWS services and wish to manage resources through a codified approach
  • Software teams that implement CI/CD pipelines and require infrastructure code to be included in those pipelines
  • DevOps teams striving for automation, consistency, and scalability in their cloud infrastructure management
  • Developers and IT professionals who need to manage complex infrastructures or regularly spin up and tear down environments

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager videos

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AWS CloudFormation videos

What is AWS Cloudformation? Pros and Cons?

More videos:

  • Demo - AWS CloudFormation Tutorial | AWS CloudFormation Demo | AWS Tutorial | AWS Training | Edureka
  • Tutorial - AWS CloudFormation Template Tutorial

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and AWS CloudFormation)
Monitoring Tools
100 100%
0% 0
DevOps Tools
0 0%
100% 100
IT Management
100 100%
0% 0
Continuous Integration
0 0%
100% 100

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and AWS CloudFormation

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager Reviews

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AWS CloudFormation Reviews

5 Best DevSecOps Tools in 2023
There are multiple providers for Infrastructure as Code such as AWS CloudFormation, RedHat Ansible, HashiCorp Terraform, Puppet, Chef, and others. It is advised to research each to determine what is best for any given situation since each has pros and cons. Some of these also are not completely free while others are. There are also some that are specific to a particular...
Do not use AWS CloudFormation
CloudFormation being a layer of indirection makes it difficult to work with in multi-region/multi-account scenarios. With CloudFormation you have to create Stack Sets and IAM policies that allow the CloudFormation service to impersonate other roles. The prerequisite steps you have to take to use CloudFormation across multiple accounts also must be taken just to have...
Why we use Terraform and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation
Of course, there are downsides to declarative languages too. Without access to a full programming language, your expressive power is limited. For example, some types of infrastructure changes, such as a rolling, zero-downtime deployment, are hard to express in purely declarative terms. Similarly, without the ability to do โ€œlogicโ€ (e.g. if-statements, loops), creating...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS CloudFormation should be more popular than Amazon EC2 Systems Manager. It has been mentiond 125 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Amazon EC2 Systems Manager mentions (17)

  • Ensuring secure values by private keys in AWS (KMS, SSM, Secrets Manager)
    This "protection" layer of our sensitive value is based on the composition of two AWS services: Key Management Service is the one responsible for creating the private key which will be used to encrypt our value, then Secret Manager or System Manager: Parameters Store allow us to accomplish the same functionality but they differ on some caveats, since the chosen one will be used for saving the secured encrypted... - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • 6 Best Practices for AWS Monitoring
    AWS Systems Manager is a service that allows you to manage and automate tasks across your AWS resources. One powerful feature of Systems Manager is the ability to set up automated remediation tasks, which can help you quickly resolve issues without manual intervention. For example, you can set up a remediation task that automatically restarts an EC2 instance if its CPU utilization exceeds a certain threshold. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How to set up AWS Session Manager logging cross account
    Instead, it uses an SSM Agent. And this agent will register itself to the AWS Systems Manager. It will use the attached instance profile to do that. From that point on when you request a shell from the Session Manager. The agent will react on this response and establish the connection. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Uncomplicating cloud Security โ€” Foundations (Part 1)
    AWS Systems Manager: you can centralize access to VMs through the service and automate security patching using the tool also. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • AWS services for SREs
    You can find more about AWS Systems Manager here. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
View more

AWS CloudFormation mentions (125)

  • From Code to Cloud in Minutes: How AWS Amplify Supercharges Modern App Development
    When you deploy a cloud sandbox, Amplify creates an AWSโ€ฏCloudFormation stack following the naming convention of amplify--<$(whoami)>-sandbox in your AWS account with the resources configured in your amplify/ folder. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • AWS Lamba & RDS Proxy
    Getting everything to work with CloudFormation and using best practices took me a while as a different setting could completely lock up the creation of a database. I also ran into issues where the RDS Proxy was created and had no errors in the console but it turned out that, using CLI tools, the network config was broken which was the reason I couldn't connect. To save you from this pain, I created a demo that... - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • What is an AWS CloudFormation Template?
    CloudFormation is an IaC AWS-native service that helps you model and configure your resources declaratively. Using CloudFormation, you can manage and operate your AWS infrastructure efficiently, so you can spend less time managing infrastructure. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Master Secure File Uploads to AWS S3 in Node.js with Express and Multer
    Basic knowledge of AWS and CloudFormation. - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • AWS Serverless Security: Preventing HTTP Flood DDoS Attack
    AWS WAF Security Automations use AWS CloudFormation to quickly configure AWS WAF rules that help block these common types of attacks:. - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Amazon EC2 Systems Manager and AWS CloudFormation, you can also consider the following products

Freshservice - Freshservice: the one-stop cloud solution for all your IT management needs.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Goverlan - Goverlan Reach provides IT systems support and remote management software solutions enabling innovative and simplified ways for businesses to address remote IT administration needs.

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.

VMware vCenter - VMware vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for managing your VMware vSphere environments.

Bamboo - Bamboo is a continuous integration and deployment tool that ties automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow.