AWS CloudFormation vs. DigitalOcean Droplets

DigitalOcean Droplets

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.8 out of 10	N/A	AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…	$0
DigitalOcean Droplets	Score 8.7 out of 10	N/A	DigitalOcean's Droplets is designed to help the user spin up a virtual machine in just 55 seconds. Standard, General Purpose, CPU-Optimized, or Memory-Optimized configurations provide flexibility to build, test, and grow an app from startup to scale.	$4 per month

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

DigitalOcean Droplets

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

Basic: $4
per month
CPU-Optimized: $42
per month
General Purpose: $63
per month
Memory-Optimized: $84
per month
Storage-Optimized: $131
per month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean Droplets
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.

Pricing for DigitalOcean Droplets varies depending on the size of the virtual environment and the associated data needs.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean Droplets

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean Droplets
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10	Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	SAP on IBM Cloud Score 9.5 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	DigitalOcean Droplets
Likelihood to Recommend	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	There are some other platforms that compete with DigitalOcean Droplets that have more performant servers for a very minimal price decrease. However, DigitalOcean's servers still have great performance, and the experience is better when you consider the developer console, managed options, and uptime that DigitalOcean offers. DigitalOcean is the better all-around package. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Simplicity to scale services--the interface is very quick and effective to use Reliability--this is key for us, as any downtime effects our reputation Keeps the costs down--hosting our own equivalent infrastructure would cost a lot more Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	In terms of an availability zone, they have limitations not available in most of the geographical locations. No live support is available which can cause problem if you have outage. Number of service is quite limited. Incentivized Anuj Rai Senior Associate Technology Read full review
Usability	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Other platforms dashboard console is more difficult to use. DigitalOcean's dashboard is clean, simple, and straightforward Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	DigitalOcean Droplets has more advanced options and the devs at our team are extremely geeky and they prefer to have full control on the server via SSH rather than cPanel. Incentivized LA Laila Abouizza Backend Developer Read full review
Return on Investment	+ 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Digital Ocean has been great helping us move web apps to the cloud Digital Ocean has been really helpful when hiring contractors The interface could use some work, but overall its not terrible Incentivized Tom Blazek IT Manager Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots