Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

AWS CloudFormation VS Cloudify

Compare AWS CloudFormation VS Cloudify 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...

Cloudify logo Cloudify

Accelerating Software Development & Deployment
  • AWS CloudFormation Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22
  • Cloudify Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-06

Cloudify provides infrastructure automation using โ€˜Environment as a Serviceโ€™ technology to deploy and continuously manage any cloud, private data center, or Kubernetes service from one central point while leveraging existing toolchains; Terraform, Ansible, and more. Use Cloudify to import existing automation templates and scripts and automatically convert them into certified environments. Manage them using the Cloudify console or export these environments to ServiceNow and enable users to deploy, continuously manage and maintain them as part of approval workflows.

Key Values: - Speed up deployments of your Test/Dev/Production environments. - Manage customers' heterogeneous cloud environments. - Enable Continuous Updates (Day-2) for your Production environments. - A clean API to work on top of all your tools that can easily be used within ServiceNow. - Manage Kubernetes clusters at scale.

Cloudify

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
SaaS Browser Premium Download
Release Date
2016 January

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.

Cloudify features and specs

  • Application Configuration Management
    Manage application configuration in a scalable and reliable way
  • Infrastructure Orchestration
    Integrate with your existing and future infrastructure
  • Environment Management
    Enable developers to create new environments whenever needed
  • Deployment Management
    Implement a Continuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment (CD) approach
  • Role-Based Access Control
    Manage who can do what in a scalable way
  • Self-service Catalog (via ITSM)
    Enable users to deploy, continuously manage and maintain environments as part of the approval workflow

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

Analysis of Cloudify

Overall verdict

  • Cloudify is a robust and versatile orchestration platform suitable for organizations needing to manage complex cloud deployments. It is particularly favored by enterprises looking for an open-source and flexible solution for multi-cloud and edge computing needs.

Why this product is good

  • Cloudify is a popular open-source platform known for orchestrating and managing cloud applications and services. It is valued for its ability to manage complex, distributed systems and simplifies deploying applications to the cloud. It supports multiple cloud environments and technologies, providing users with flexibility and scalability. Cloudify's use of TOSCA (Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications) enables users to model services more effectively, promoting service reuse and simplifying the management of infrastructure configurations.

Recommended for

  • Organizations with complex, multi-cloud environments.
  • Enterprises needing orchestration for both cloud-native and legacy applications.
  • Teams using DevOps practices and requiring continuous deployment and integration capabilities.
  • Projects that benefit from TOSCA-based modeling and service orchestration.

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

Cloudify videos

Cloudify | Initial Deployment

More videos:

  • Demo - Cloudify | Day 02 application updates
  • Demo - Cloudify | Day 2 Infrastructure Updates
  • Demo - Cloudify | Initial Deployment with ServiceNow approvals
  • Demo - Complex Terraform Deployment

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS CloudFormation and Cloudify)
DevOps Tools
87 87%
13% 13
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
66 66%
34% 34

User comments

Share your experience with using AWS CloudFormation and Cloudify. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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...

Cloudify Reviews

We have no reviews of Cloudify yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS CloudFormation seems to be a lot more popular than Cloudify. While we know about 129 links to AWS CloudFormation, we've tracked only 2 mentions of Cloudify. 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 (129)

  • Dynamic Looping Comes to AWS SAM
    AWS SAM CLI, the command-line tool for building and deploying serverless applications, now supports AWS CloudFormation Language Extensions. The one I am most excited about is Fn::ForEach, which brings dynamic looping to your YAML templates, but it's close. If you, like me, have been copy-pasting resource definitions to infinity, that stops today. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • AWS CloudFormation Drift Detection & Remediation Guide
    AWS CloudFormation is an IaC service that helps users automate, scale, and manage their environments efficiently. On the other hand, GitOps has become one of the standard ways of ensuring the IaC configuration stored in code repositories is deployed live on the correct systems. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Announcing AWS CDK Mixins: Composable Abstractions for AWS Resources
    The AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) is an open-source software development framework for defining cloud infrastructure in code and provisioning it through AWS CloudFormation. It contains pre-written modular and reusable cloud components known as constructs. Constructs are the basic building blocks representing one or more AWS CloudFormation resources and their configuration. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Top 12 Puppet Alternatives for Automation
    Website: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • 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 / about 1 year ago
View more

Cloudify mentions (2)

  • Best IaC platforms
    Cloudify looks interesting if you can stand the price, depends how badly you need the features it offers. Source: about 4 years ago
  • Hey Cloud Peoples!
    Cloudify is a platform that automates and manages entire lifecycles of an application or network service. Source: over 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

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

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

OpenShift - OpenShift gives you all the tools you need to develop, host and scale your apps in the public or private cloud. Get started today.

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

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

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

Heroku - Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.