AWS CloudFormation vs Concourse

Overview

AWS CloudFormation

Stacks1.6K

Followers1.3K

Votes88

Concourse

Stacks254

Followers393

Votes54

GitHub Stars7.6K

Forks870

AWS CloudFormation vs Concourse: What are the differences?

Introduction:

AWS CloudFormation and Concourse are both popular tools used for infrastructure automation and configuration management. However, they have several key differences that set them apart in terms of functionality and use cases.

1. Integration with AWS Services: AWS CloudFormation is tightly integrated with other AWS services, allowing users to easily provision and manage resources within the AWS ecosystem. On the other hand, Concourse is more focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and may have limited integration with specific cloud providers such as AWS.

2. Templating and Configuration Management: AWS CloudFormation utilizes JSON or YAML templates to define and provision resources in a declarative manner, making it easy to manage infrastructure as code. Concourse, on the other hand, is primarily designed for automating workflows and pipelines, with a focus on running tasks and jobs rather than defining infrastructure configurations.

3. Workflow Automation: Concourse excels in automating complex workflows, especially in the software development lifecycle, where it can orchestrate multiple tasks and stages seamlessly. AWS CloudFormation, while capable of provisioning resources in a structured manner, may not offer the same level of workflow automation and pipeline management capabilities as Concourse.

4. User Community and Support: AWS CloudFormation has a large user base and extensive documentation and support provided by Amazon Web Services, making it easier for users to troubleshoot issues and find resources for learning and development. Concourse, while popular in the CI/CD community, may have a smaller user community and may require more effort to find relevant information and support.

5. Scalability and Flexibility: AWS CloudFormation is well-suited for managing large-scale infrastructure deployments and environments, with capabilities for handling complex dependencies and resource configurations. Concourse, while scalable for CI/CD workflows, may not offer the same level of flexibility and customization for infrastructure provisioning and management tasks.

6. Cost Considerations: When considering cost implications, AWS CloudFormation is a service provided by AWS, so users may incur costs based on their resource usage and provisioning. Concourse, being an open-source tool, may provide a cost-effective solution for organizations looking to implement CI/CD pipelines without additional licensing fees or service charges.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation is ideal for infrastructure provisioning and management within the AWS ecosystem, while Concourse is more focused on automating workflows and pipelines in the CI/CD process, with differences in integration, templating, workflow automation, community support, scalability, and cost considerations.

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CLI (Node.js)

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Advice on AWS CloudFormation, Concourse

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	Concourse
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.	Concourse's principles reduce the risk of switching to and from Concourse, by encouraging practices that decouple your project from your CI's little details, and keeping all configuration in declarative files that can be checked into version control.
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.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 7.6K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 870
Stacks 1.6K	Stacks 254
Followers 1.3K	Followers 393
Votes 88	Votes 54
Pros & Cons
Pros 43 Automates infrastructure deployments 21 Declarative infrastructure and deployment 13 No more clicking around 3 Infrastructure as code 3 Atomic Cons 4 Brittle 2 No RBAC and policies in templates	Pros 16 Real pipelines 10 Containerised builds 9 Flexible engine 6 Fast 4 Open source Cons 2 Fail forward instead of rollback pattern

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation, Concourse?

Jenkins

In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

TeamCity

TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

GoCD

GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server created by ThoughtWorks. GoCD offers business a first-class build and deployment engine for complete control and visibility.

Shippable

Shippable is a SaaS platform that lets you easily add Continuous Integration/Deployment to your Github and BitBucket repositories. It is lightweight, super simple to setup, and runs your builds and tests faster than any other service.

Buildkite

CI and build automation tool that combines the power of your own build infrastructure with the convenience of a managed, centralized web UI. Used by Shopify, Basecamp, Digital Ocean, Venmo, Cochlear, Bugsnag and more.

Related Comparisons

AWS CloudFormation vs Concourse: What are the differences?

Introduction:

AWS CloudFormation vs Concourse

Overview