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  1. Stackups
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  4. Infrastructure Build Tools
  5. AWS CloudFormation vs Visual Studio Code

AWS CloudFormation vs Visual Studio Code

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.3K
Votes88
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code
Stacks186.5K
Followers169.1K
Votes2.3K
GitHub Stars178.2K
Forks35.9K

AWS CloudFormation vs Visual Studio Code: What are the differences?

Introduction

This markdown provides a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and Visual Studio Code.

  1. Deployment Infrastructure: AWS CloudFormation is a service that helps you model and set operational resources. In contrast, Visual Studio Code is a source-code editor that comes with built-in support for JavaScript, TypeScript, and Node.js.

  2. Automation Capabilities: AWS CloudFormation enables you to provision and manage resources through infrastructure as code. On the other hand, Visual Studio Code provides features such as debugging, intelligent code completion, and Git integration for improved automation of software development tasks.

  3. Scalability: AWS CloudFormation allows for the scaling of resources based on requirements, making it suitable for large-scale infrastructure management. In comparison, Visual Studio Code is more focused on code editing and does not directly support infrastructure scaling.

  4. Version Control Integration: Visual Studio Code offers seamless integration with Git for version control, enabling better collaboration and tracking of code changes. However, AWS CloudFormation does not have built-in version control capabilities but can be integrated with external version control tools for managing infrastructure changes.

  5. Cost Structure: AWS CloudFormation incurs costs based on the resources provisioned and managed in the cloud environment. Visual Studio Code, on the other hand, is a free and open-source tool that is primarily used for code development and editing without additional cost implications.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation focuses on infrastructure provisioning and management, while Visual Studio Code is a versatile code editor with features for software development tasks.

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Advice on AWS CloudFormation, Visual Studio Code

Kamaleshwar
Kamaleshwar

Software Engineer at Dibiz Pte. Ltd.

Jul 8, 2020

Decided

Visual Studio Code became famous over the past 3+ years I believe. The clean UI, easy to use UX and the plethora of integrations made it a very easy decision for us. Our gripe with Sublime was probably only the UX side. VSCode has not failed us till now, and still is able to support our development env without any significant effort.

Goland being paid, as well as built only for Go seemed like a significant limitation to not consider it.

1.36M views1.36M
Comments
Timothy
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
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

Detailed Comparison

AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code

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.

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

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.
Combines UI of a modern editor with code assistance and navigation; Integrated debugging experience
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
178.2K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
35.9K
Stacks
1.6K
Stacks
186.5K
Followers
1.3K
Followers
169.1K
Votes
88
Votes
2.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Atomic
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
Cons
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
Pros
  • 341
    Powerful multilanguage IDE
  • 310
    Fast
  • 194
    Front-end develop out of the box
  • 158
    Support TypeScript IntelliSense
  • 142
    Very basic but free
Cons
  • 46
    Slow startup
  • 29
    Resource hog at times
  • 20
    Poor refactoring
  • 14
    Poor UI Designer
  • 11
    Weak Ui design tools

What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation, Visual Studio Code?

Sublime Text

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.

Atom

Atom

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.

Vim

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.

Notepad++

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

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

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

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

VSCodium

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

TextMate

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

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

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