Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

AWS CloudFormation VS Spacelift.io

Compare AWS CloudFormation VS Spacelift.io 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...

Spacelift.io logo Spacelift.io

Collaborative Infrastructure For Modern Software Teams
  • AWS CloudFormation Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-03-22
  • Spacelift.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-08

Spacelift is the most flexible management platform for Infrastructure as Code that helps DevOps teams manage their infrastructure-as-code performance for maximum optimization of scaling businesses.

Founded in 2020, Spacelift allows teams to manage complex cloud infrastructures simultaneously, providing visibility and collaboration. Itโ€™s a hybrid of super-specialized, narrowly focused IaC automation tools and very generic CI/CDs like Jenkins or CircleCI. Thanks to Spacelift, teams are able to boost their productivity, automate manual processes, and ensure control and compliance.

Spacelift is the only IaC management solution that extends IaC DevOps to encompass the complete set of IaC frameworks including Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation, with Ansible coming soon. Offering a consolidated approach to IaC is beneficial to engineering teams in large corporations that have been acquiring smaller companies that bring different infrastructures and to smaller but diverse organizations aiming to empower application developers.

We have raised over $22M in funding to advance the automation, control and scalability of infrastructure as code. Among our investors are Insight Partners, Blossom Capital, Hoxton Ventures, Inovo Venture Partners, and the founders of Supercell and Yelp.

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.

Spacelift.io features and specs

  • Infrastructure as Code Support
    Spacelift supports popular IaC tools like Terraform, Pulumi, and CloudFormation, facilitating efficient infrastructure management and automation.
  • Scalability
    Spacelift is designed to handle infrastructure of various sizes, allowing for seamless scaling as project demands increase.
  • Policy as Code
    It enables the use of policy as code with customizable policies in Rego, providing security, compliance, and cost control capabilities.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Spacelift provides integrations with major cloud providers, VCS systems, and CI/CD tools, enhancing its extensibility and workflow automation.
  • Collaboration Features
    Offers collaboration tools like team management, approvals, and notifications to improve teamwork and communication among developers.

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 Spacelift.io

Overall verdict

  • Spacelift.io is generally regarded as a good choice for teams looking to streamline their infrastructure management. Its robust feature set, focus on modern DevOps practices, and compatibility with a wide range of tools make it a solid option for businesses and developers managing complex cloud environments.

Why this product is good

  • Spacelift.io is known for its strong DevOps capabilities, focusing on infrastructure as code (IaC) management. It offers features like policy as code, continuous integration and deployment for IaC, and supports tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, and more. The platform is praised for its flexibility, collaboration tools, security measures, and automation capabilities which enhance efficiency and consistency in managing cloud infrastructure.

Recommended for

    Spacelift.io is recommended for DevOps teams, cloud infrastructure engineers, and organizations that are leveraging infrastructure as code practices. It is particularly beneficial for those using multi-cloud strategies or looking for efficient ways to manage and automate their cloud infrastructures with tools like Terraform, CloudFormation, and others.

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

Spacelift.io videos

Spacelift Introduction

More videos:

  • Review - Infrastructure as Code at scale with Spacelift.io's Marcin Wyszynski [DevOps Deployed Ep 08]

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to AWS CloudFormation and Spacelift.io)
DevOps Tools
83 83%
17% 17
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
89 89%
11% 11
Infrastructure As Code
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using AWS CloudFormation and Spacelift.io. 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 Spacelift.io

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...

Spacelift.io Reviews

Top 10 Most Popular Jenkins Alternatives for DevOps in 2024
Spacelift connects to popular VCS providers, including GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, and Azure DevOps. It integrates with your pull request workflows to allow developers to make infrastructure changes while respecting policies and guardrails enforced by administrators. Spacelift also defends against drift by automatically detecting and remediating unexpected changes in your...
Source: spacelift.io

Social recommendations and mentions

Spacelift.io might be a bit more popular than AWS CloudFormation. We know about 130 links to it since March 2021 and only 129 links to AWS CloudFormation. 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 / about 1 month 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 / 7 months ago
  • Top 12 Puppet Alternatives for Automation
    Website: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/. - Source: dev.to / 7 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 / 12 months ago
View more

Spacelift.io mentions (130)

  • Ansible Security Automation
    Spacelift users have native policies to help them check Ansible code at the playbook level. These policies enable you to ensure that specific tasks are not run on private node pools, or you can use an approval policy to confirm everyone on the team is aligned before a change goes live. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • How to Use Terraform Slice Function [Examples]
    Terraform is really powerful, but to achieve an end-to-end secure GitOps approach, you need to use a product that can run your Terraform workflows. Spacelift takes managing Terraform to the next level by giving you access to a powerful CI/CD workflow and unlocking features such as:. - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Using Ansible File Module to Manage Files & Directories
    Spacelift's vibrant ecosystem and excellent GitOps flow are helpful for managing and orchestrating Ansible. By introducing Spacelift on top of Ansible, you can easily create custom workflows based on pull requests and apply any necessary compliance checks for your organization. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
  • Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2025)
    Spacelift | Remote (Europe) | Full-time | Senior Software Engineer | $80k-$110k+ (can go higher) We're a VC-funded startup (recently raised $51M Series C) building an infrastructure orchestrator and collaborative management platform for Infrastructure-as-Code โ€“ from OpenTofu, Terraform, Terragrunt, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Kubernetes, to Ansible. On the backend we're using 100% Go with AWS primitives. We're looking... - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
  • 15 Common Kubernetes Pitfalls & Challenges
    Avoid manually administering Kubernetes by integrating cluster operations into your CI/CD and GitOps workflows using a management platform such as Spacelift. Spacelift helps you reduce Kubernetes complexity, synchronize changes between environments, and enforce compliance policies. It works with other infrastructure components, including Terraform and Pulumi, too. - Source: dev.to / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing AWS CloudFormation and Spacelift.io, you can also consider the following products

AWS Lambda - Automatic, event-driven compute service

Scalr - Scalr is cloud management software for public & private infrastructure

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

env0 - The Best Way to Manage Your Terraform and Infrastructure as Code Manage, deploy, scale, and control all your Terraform, Terragrunt, Pulumi, and related frameworks

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

GitHub Actions - Automate your workflow from idea to production