AWS CloudFormation vs Atom

Overview

AWS CloudFormation

Stacks1.6K

Followers1.3K

Votes88

Atom

Stacks16.9K

Followers14.5K

Votes2.5K

GitHub Stars60.8K

Forks17.3K

AWS CloudFormation vs Atom: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS CloudFormation and Atom

1. Templating Language: AWS CloudFormation uses AWS CloudFormation Templates (CFT), which are written in JSON or YAML format. These templates define the resources and their configurations that need to be provisioned in an AWS environment. On the other hand, Atom is a highly customizable text editor that supports various programming languages and offers a wide range of features and packages for developers.

2. Purpose: AWS CloudFormation is specifically designed for infrastructure as code (IaC), allowing users to automate the management and provisioning of AWS resources. Atom, on the other hand, is primarily used as a general-purpose text editor for coding, supporting a wide range of programming languages and offering extensive customization options.

3. Cloud Environment: AWS CloudFormation is tightly integrated with AWS services and allows users to provision, update, and manage resources in the AWS cloud environment. Atom, on the other hand, is not limited to any specific cloud environment and can be used for coding in various environments and platforms.

4. Collaboration and Version Control: AWS CloudFormation provides built-in collaboration features, such as sharing templates and stacks, and integration with version control systems like AWS CodeCommit. Atom also supports collaboration and version control through plugins and integrations with popular platforms like GitHub.

5. Deployment and Orchestration: AWS CloudFormation enables users to deploy and orchestrate complex applications and infrastructure using a declarative approach, specifying the desired end state. Atom, being a text editor, does not have built-in deployment or orchestration capabilities and relies on external tools or scripts for these purposes.

6. Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Integration: AWS CloudFormation has native integrations with CI/CD tools like AWS CodePipeline, allowing for seamless integration of infrastructure changes into existing development workflows. Atom, as a standalone text editor, does not have native CI/CD integrations and requires additional configuration and tooling for CI/CD workflows.

In summary, AWS CloudFormation is a specialized service for infrastructure as code and cloud resource provisioning, while Atom is a versatile text editor with extensive customization options for coding purposes. CloudFormation is tightly integrated with AWS services and supports deployment and orchestration, collaboration, and version control in the AWS cloud environment, whereas Atom is not limited to any specific cloud environment and requires additional tooling for similar functionalities.

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Advice on AWS CloudFormation, Atom

Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.

385k views385k

Comments

Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

426k views426k

Comments

Sergey

Contractor at Adaptive

Apr 17, 2020

Decided

Overview

We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.

Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.

Advantages

Terraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.

Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.

Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.

Disadvantages

Software is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.

Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.

Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.

426k views426k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudFormation	Atom
You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.	At GitHub, we're building the text editor we've always wanted. A tool you can customize to do anything, but also use productively on the first day without ever touching a config file. Atom is modern, approachable, and hackable to the core. We can't wait to see what you build with it.
AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt);No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack);Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.;Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.	Atom is a desktop application based on web technologies;Node.js integration;Modular Design- composed of over 50 open-source packages that integrate around a minimal core;File system browser;Fuzzy finder for quickly opening files;Fast project-wide search and replace;Multiple cursors and selections;Multiple panes;Snippets;Code folding;A clean preferences UI;Import TextMate grammars and themes
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 60.8K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 17.3K
Stacks 1.6K	Stacks 16.9K
Followers 1.3K	Followers 14.5K
Votes 88	Votes 2.5K
Pros & Cons
Pros 43 Automates infrastructure deployments 21 Declarative infrastructure and deployment 13 No more clicking around 3 Any Operative System you want 3 Infrastructure as code Cons 4 Brittle 2 No RBAC and policies in templates	Pros 529 Free 449 Open source 343 Modular design 321 Hackable 316 Beautiful UI Cons 19 Slow with large files 7 Slow startup 2 Most of the time packages are hard to find. 1 Cannot Run code with F5 1 No longer maintained
Integrations
No integrations available	GitHub

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation, Atom?

Sublime Text

Sublime Text is available for OS X, Windows and Linux. One license is all you need to use Sublime Text on every computer you own, no matter what operating system it uses. Sublime Text uses a custom UI toolkit, optimized for speed and beauty, while taking advantage of native functionality on each platform.

Vim

Vim is an advanced text editor that seeks to provide the power of the de-facto Unix editor 'Vi', with a more complete feature set. Vim is a highly configurable text editor built to enable efficient text editing. It is an improved version of the vi editor distributed with most UNIX systems. Vim is distributed free as charityware.

Visual Studio Code

Build and debug modern web and cloud applications. Code is free and available on your favorite platform - Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows.

Notepad++

Notepad++ is a free (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") source code editor and Notepad replacement that supports several languages. Running in the MS Windows environment, its use is governed by GPL License.

Emacs

GNU Emacs is an extensible, customizable text editor—and more. At its core is an interpreter for Emacs Lisp, a dialect of the Lisp programming language with extensions to support text editing.

Brackets

With focused visual tools and preprocessor support, it is a modern text editor that makes it easy to design in the browser.

Neovim

Neovim is a project that seeks to aggressively refactor Vim in order to: simplify maintenance and encourage contributions, split the work between multiple developers, enable the implementation of new/modern user interfaces without any modifications to the core source, and improve extensibility with a new plugin architecture.

VSCodium

It is a community-driven, freely-licensed binary distribution of Microsoft’s editor VSCode.

TextMate

TextMate brings Apple's approach to operating systems into the world of text editors. By bridging UNIX underpinnings and GUI, TextMate cherry-picks the best of both worlds to the benefit of expert scripters and novice users alike.

gedit

gedit is the GNOME text editor. While aiming at simplicity and ease of use, gedit is a powerful general purpose text editor.

Related Comparisons

AWS CloudFormation vs Atom: What are the differences?

Key Differences between AWS CloudFormation and Atom

AWS CloudFormation vs Atom

Overview

AWS CloudFormation vs Atom: What are the differences?