Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

AWS CloudFormation VS AWS Control Tower

Compare AWS CloudFormation VS AWS Control Tower and see what are their differences

AWS CloudFormation logo AWS CloudFormation

AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a...

AWS Control Tower logo AWS Control Tower

AWS Control Tower provides you with a single location to set up a well-architected multi-account environment to govern your AWS workloads with rules for security, operations, and compliance. Sign up for our preview today!
  • AWS CloudFormation Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22
  • AWS Control Tower Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-11-05

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

AWS Control Tower videos

What is AWS Control Tower?

More videos:

  • Review - AWS re:Inforce 2019: Using AWS Control Tower to Govern Multi-Account AWS Environments (GRC313-R)
  • Review - Enable AWS Control Tower for Existing Organizations

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS CloudFormation and AWS Control Tower)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Security
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Monitoring Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare AWS CloudFormation and AWS Control Tower

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 “logic” (e.g. if-statements, loops), creating...

AWS Control Tower Reviews

We have no reviews of AWS Control Tower yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS CloudFormation should be more popular than AWS Control Tower. It has been mentiond 113 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.

AWS CloudFormation mentions (113)

  • Terraform vs. AWS CloudFormation
    Given AWS CloudFormation is AWS's native language and service for infrastructure as code, you will likely find more official quickstarts provided by AWS in the language. In addition to this, AWS Support will probably be more capable of assisting you with issues when you need help. AWS Support is essential for large enterprises, particularly those new to the cloud or slow to adopt. These types of organizations may... - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • Building an Amazon Location Service Resources with AWS CDK and AWS CloudFormation
    Today, I will show you how to build Amazon Location Service, which allows you to build location-based applications within your AWS environment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) and AWS CloudFormation. I will also show examples of the recently popular CDK Migrate and AWS CloudFormation IaC generator. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • DevSecOps with AWS- IaC at scale - Building your own platform - Part 1
    AWS CloudFormation: Speed up cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • The 2024 Web Hosting Report
    Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is an important part of any true hosting operation in the public cloud. Each of these platforms has their own IaC solution, e.g. AWS CloudFormation. But they also support popular open-source IaC tools like Pulumi or Terraform. A category of tools that also needs to be discussed is API gateways and other app-specific load balancers. There are applications for internal consumption,... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Authorization and Amazon Verified Permissions - A New Way to Manage Permissions Part XIII: Cloudformation
    Cloudformation (IaC) does not need to be introduced to anyone, plus if you read the previous blogpost, the terraform provider (CC) we used is based on Cloudformation. Moreover, you will notice a lot of similarities, after all, we are implementing the same scenario, but with a different tool. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
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AWS Control Tower mentions (16)

  • Is AWS Landing Zone Accelerator any good?
    I think it’s been superseded by Control Tower, right? Landing Zones solutions refer to the days when there wasn’t an actual service that did account vending and policy. Https://aws.amazon.com/controltower/. Source: 7 months ago
  • Receiving Slack notifications when CloudTrail logging gets turned off
    Amazon CloudTrail is the surveillance camera for our accounts. It records every API call that any users or roles make. If we have multiple accounts set up in AWS Organizations, we can create a central trail in the management account. We can then enable logging to all accounts and all regions. Or, if we use Control Tower to set up the account structure, we don't need to do anything because it will automatically... - Source: dev.to / 9 months ago
  • Presenting AWS Speakers Directory, an AI Hackathon Project
    Deploy our application to sandbox, test, and production environments in a multi-account AWS organization managed by Control Tower. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Testing your Landing Zone when using AWS Deployment Framework
    Build your own… In this post I am focussing on ADF. The benefit of ADF over AWS Control Tower is that you have more control over the framework. All resources run in your accounts and are under your control. AWS Control Tower is a managed service by AWS. Giving less flexibility but remove maintenance burden. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • An AWS account just for getting into other AWS accounts
    Https://aws.amazon.com/controltower/ If we all started using Control Tower perhaps they'd get funded enough to continue to build it out and make it awesome. - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing AWS CloudFormation and AWS Control Tower, you can also consider the following products

Terraform - Tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently.

Qualys - Qualys helps your business automate the full spectrum of auditing, compliance and protection of your IT systems and web applications.

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Azure Security Center - Turn on Azure Security Center to gain unmatched hybrid cloud security management and threat protection for your workloads.

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

Google Cloud Platform Security Overview - Cloud Workload Protection Platforms