Software Alternatives & Reviews

AWS CloudFormation VS AWS Step Functions

Compare AWS CloudFormation VS AWS Step Functions 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 Step Functions logo AWS Step Functions

AWS Step Functions makes it easy to coordinate the components of distributed applications and microservices using visual workflows.
  • AWS CloudFormation Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22
  • AWS Step Functions Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-29

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 Step Functions videos

Orchestrating Distributed Business Workflows with AWS Step Functions - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Parallelism and concurrency in Step Functions and AWS Lambda
  • Review - AWS Step Functions: Workflows for development and testing

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS CloudFormation and AWS Step Functions)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Project Management
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Web Service Automation
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 Step Functions

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 Step Functions Reviews

Top 8 Apache Airflow Alternatives in 2024
This service suits for many use cases, such as building ETL pipelines, orchestrating microservices, and managing high workloads. AWS Step Functions is particularly efficient when combined with other AWS solutions: Lambda for computing, Dynamo DB for storage, Athena for Analytics, SageMaker for machine learning, etc.
Source: blog.skyvia.com
10 Best Airflow Alternatives for 2024
AWS Step Functions enable the incorporation of AWS services such as Lambda, Fargate, SNS, SQS, SageMaker, and EMR into business processes, Data Pipelines, and applications. Users and enterprises can choose between 2 types of workflows: Standard (for long-running workloads) and Express (for high-volume event processing workloads), depending on their use case.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS CloudFormation should be more popular than AWS Step Functions. 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 / 16 days 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 / 25 days 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 / about 1 month 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 / 2 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 / 3 months ago
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AWS Step Functions mentions (57)

  • Serverless Data Processor using AWS Lambda, Step Functions and Fargate on ECS (with Rust 🦀🦀)
    There are a few ways to solve this of course but one solution I wanted to explore is using AWS Step Functions (https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/) to drive the whole process. Step Functions is a serverless workflow orchestration system. One part of it is support for a distributed map mode where you can run many parallel operations over a set of data. There are different approaches you can use to get the list... - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • The Energy Drink Episodes 3: The Step Function Awakens
    If you have ever spoken to me, read anything I've written or listened to any talks I’ve done in relation to Serverless or infrastructure as code, there is a high likelihood that I have confessed my love for Step Functions. Even when unprompted. Putting my biases aside, however, there are some legitimate reasons we can consider using them in our app. If you are new to Step Functions or just fancy a refresher, have... - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Testing Serverless Applications on AWS
    For context; the web application is built with React and TypeScript which makes calls to an AppSync API that makes use of the Lambda and DynamoDB datasources. We use Step Functions to orchestrate the flow of events for complex processing like purchasing and renewing policies, and we use S3 and SQS to process document workloads. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Customizing error handling in Step Functions
    If we have to coordinate multiple function calls, we can use AWS Step Functions to orchestrate the workflow. Step Functions integrates with many other AWS services, but here I'll focus on Lambda functions. - Source: dev.to / 11 months ago
  • Amazon Ditches Microservices for Monolith: Decoding Prime Video's Architectural Shift
    Amazon's tool was broken into three main components: the media converter, defect detectors, and orchestration. The media converter ran as an AWS Lambda function, converted audio and video streams, and stored the data in an S3 bucket. The defect detectors, also running as an AWS Lambda function, would pull the parsed data from the S3 bucket and analyze the frames and audio for any issues. Finally, the orchestration... - Source: dev.to / 12 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing AWS CloudFormation and AWS Step Functions, you can also consider the following products

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

Zapier - Connect the apps you use everyday to automate your work and be more productive. 1000+ apps and easy integrations - get started in minutes.

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

Nintex - Cloud-based digital workflow management automation platform

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

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