AWS CloudFormation vs Cloud Foundry

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AWS CloudFormation vs Cloud Foundry: What are the differences?

Introduction:

AWS CloudFormation and Cloud Foundry are both popular cloud computing platforms that enable organizations to deploy and manage their applications and infrastructure in the cloud. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two platforms in terms of their focus, scope, and underlying technologies.

  1. Scope of Management: AWS CloudFormation is primarily focused on managing the infrastructure resources and configuration required for deploying and running applications in the cloud. It provides a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, such as EC2 instances, databases, load balancers, and networking components, all as a single unit called a stack. On the other hand, Cloud Foundry is an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) framework that offers a higher level of abstraction, enabling developers to focus more on the application logic rather than the underlying infrastructure. It provides a runtime environment that handles the deployment, scaling, and management of applications, abstracting away the complexities of infrastructure management.

  2. Multi-Cloud Support: AWS CloudFormation is specific to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem and is tightly integrated with other AWS services and features. It enables users to orchestrate the creation and management of AWS resources using declarative templates written in YAML or JSON. Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, is cloud-agnostic and supports multiple cloud providers, including AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure, among others. It provides a consistent platform experience across different cloud environments, allowing applications to be deployed and managed seamlessly across various clouds without being locked into a specific cloud provider.

  3. Deployment Approach: AWS CloudFormation follows an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) approach, where the desired configuration of the infrastructure is specified using a template, which is then used to manage the creation, modification, and deletion of resources in a predictable and automated manner. Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, takes a different approach by abstracting away the infrastructure details and focusing on providing a platform for deploying and running applications. It follows a more developer-centric approach, where applications are packaged as self-contained artifacts and deployed using the cf push command, which automatically handles the routing, scaling, and lifecycle management of the applications.

  4. Community and Ecosystem: AWS CloudFormation benefits from being part of the extensive AWS ecosystem, which offers a wide range of services, tools, and integrations that can be used in conjunction with CloudFormation to build and manage cloud applications. It has a large and active community that provides support, documentation, and a repository of pre-defined templates for different use cases. Cloud Foundry, being an open-source project, also has a vibrant community and ecosystem that contributes to its development and provides a wealth of resources, including buildpacks, service brokers, and marketplace offerings, extending the capabilities of the platform.

  5. Granularity of Control: AWS CloudFormation provides fine-grained control over the resources and configuration settings, allowing users to specify the exact details of how the resources should be provisioned and configured. It supports conditional logic, parameterization, and resource dependencies, enabling users to define complex deployment scenarios. Cloud Foundry, on the other hand, abstracts away the lower-level infrastructure details and provides a higher level of abstraction, which may limit the control and flexibility for users who require more granular control over the deployment and configuration of their applications.

  6. Integration with Existing Workflows: AWS CloudFormation integrates well with other AWS services and can be seamlessly integrated into existing CI/CD pipelines and automation workflows. It supports integration with AWS CodePipeline, AWS CodeCommit, and other DevOps tools, enabling users to automate the entire application lifecycle from development to production. Cloud Foundry also integrates with various CI/CD tools and provides a robust set of APIs and CLI commands for automating tasks, making it easy to incorporate the platform into existing workflows.

In summary, AWS CloudFormation is a service focused on managing the infrastructure resources and configuration in the AWS ecosystem, adopting an infrastructure-as-code approach, while Cloud Foundry is a cloud-agnostic open-source platform-as-a-service framework that simplifies application deployment and management, abstracting away the infrastructure details. Cloud Foundry offers multi-cloud support, a higher level of abstraction, and a vibrant community, while AWS CloudFormation provides fine-grained control, deep integration with AWS services, and native support for AWS resources.

Decisions about AWS CloudFormation and Cloud Foundry
Kirill Shirinkin
Cloud and DevOps Consultant at mkdev · | 3 upvotes · 141.9K views

Ok, so first - AWS Copilot is CloudFormation under the hood, but the way it works results in you not thinking about CFN anymore. AWS found the right balance with Copilot - it's insanely simple to setup production-ready multi-account environment with many services inside, with CI/CD out of the box etc etc. It's pretty new, but even now it was enough to launch Transcripto, which uses may be a dozen of different AWS services, all bound together by Copilot.

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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.

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Sergey Ivanov
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.

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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.
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Pros of AWS CloudFormation
Pros of Cloud Foundry
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Any Operative System you want
  • 3
    Atomic
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
  • 1
    CDK makes it truly infrastructure-as-code
  • 1
    Automates Infrastructure Deployment
  • 0
    K8s
  • 2
    Perfectly aligned with springboot
  • 1
    Free distributed tracing (zipkin)
  • 1
    Application health management
  • 1
    Free service discovery (Eureka)

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Cons of AWS CloudFormation
Cons of Cloud Foundry
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is AWS CloudFormation?

    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.

    What is Cloud Foundry?

    Cloud Foundry is an open platform as a service (PaaS) that provides a choice of clouds, developer frameworks, and application services. Cloud Foundry makes it faster and easier to build, test, deploy, and scale applications.

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    What companies use AWS CloudFormation?
    What companies use Cloud Foundry?
    See which teams inside your own company are using AWS CloudFormation or Cloud Foundry.
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    What tools integrate with AWS CloudFormation?
    What tools integrate with Cloud Foundry?

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    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation and Cloud Foundry?
    AWS CodeDeploy
    AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications.
    Chef
    Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
    Terraform
    With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    See all alternatives