AWS CloudFormation vs. AWS Config

Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the Cloning Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource. Management guide. For information virtual hardware, installed software cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information.

Incentivized

To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.

Incentivized

• IaC, transactional on top of that
• Support for "mainstream" general programming languages
• Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly
• OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages

Incentivized

• It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
• It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
• It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
• You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Incentivized

• Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved.
• Slow to create, delete or update.
• Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them.

Incentivized

• Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
• Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Incentivized

It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.

Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.

However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.

Incentivized

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Incentivized

Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource.

Incentivized

Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.

Incentivized

• + We can standup a VPC in minutes
• - It took a lot of inital time to set up
• + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized