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AWS CloudFormation vs Azure Resource Manager: What are the differences?
Developers describe AWS CloudFormation as "Create and manage a collection of related AWS resources". 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. On the other hand, Azure Resource Manager is detailed as "* A management framework that allows administrators to deploy, manage and monitor Azure resources*". It also allows administrators to apply access controls to all services in a resource group with role-based access control (RBAC), which is integrated into ARM.
AWS CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager can be categorized as "Infrastructure Build" tools.
Some of the features offered by AWS CloudFormation are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Azure Resource Manager provides the following key features:
- Deploy app resources
- Organize resources
- Control access to resources
Azure Resource Manager is an open source tool with 63 GitHub stars and 46 GitHub forks. Here's a link to Azure Resource Manager's open source repository on GitHub.
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.
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.
AdvantagesTerraform 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.
DisadvantagesSoftware 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.
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.
Pros of AWS CloudFormation
- Automates infrastructure deployments43
- Declarative infrastructure and deployment21
- No more clicking around13
- Any Operative System you want3
- Atomic3
- Infrastructure as code3
- Cons1
- CDK makes it truly infrastructure-as-code1
- Automates Infrastructure Deployment1
- K8s0
Pros of Azure Resource Manager
- Bicep - Simple Declarative Language2
- Infrastructure-as-Code1
- Over 1K samples the QuickStart repo1
- Deep integration with Azure services like Azure Policy1
- Day 1 resource support1
- RBAC and Policies in templates1
- Versioned deployment via Blueprints1
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Cons of AWS CloudFormation
- Brittle4
- No RBAC and policies in templates2
Cons of Azure Resource Manager
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What is AWS CloudFormation?
What is Azure Resource Manager?
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