AWS CloudFormation Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services Reviews & Insights

We are using AWS CloudFormation to provision infrastructure on AWS in different AWS accounts for different environments. It is being used by the whole company. We have a product that requires infrastructure on the cloud to make it run. It helps us in continuous delivery and fast infrastructure deployment. As we have more than 20 environments, AWS CloudFormation helps us in using the same templates with different values for each environment, resulting in reusability and saving time and effort.

AWS CloudFormation is well suited when you have your whole infrastructure on AWS. It can be used to divide your whole infrastructure into multiple templates so you can redeploy variable infrastructure separately. It is good for infrastructure stack visibility and tracking. It is not good when you have resources on multiple clouds. Cloud-agnostic tools like Terraform can be used for such purposes.

We use it to expedite or deployment for VPCs. It creates almost all of the resources we need to for the most basic standup with a few parameters that get filled in. We can also use it to deploy smaller resources as well that don't require a full VPC standup. We're also looking into it for other use cases, but for the most part, it has greatly decreased the time to stand up a new VPC.

I think repeatable tasks that require a lot of "clicking" are where it's best suited. Also, for VPC and smaller deployments, I think it's a great tool, but it does have some limitations. Not all resources are available, so sometimes you can only create the base part of your deployment, and manually have to input some values later on. From my understanding, Cloudformation is best while contained within individual regions of AWS.