AWS CloudFormation vs AWS Config: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config, two powerful services provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for managing and monitoring your infrastructure in the cloud.

1. Key Difference 1: Infrastructure Management vs. Resource Configuration: AWS CloudFormation focuses on infrastructure management and provisioning by allowing you to define and deploy infrastructure resources as code using templates. It helps in automating the process of creating, updating, and deleting resources in a consistent and repeatable manner. On the other hand, AWS Config focuses on resource configuration management by continuously monitoring and recording changes to your AWS resources, providing a detailed inventory, and enabling compliance and security assessment.

2. Key Difference 2: Provisioning vs. Configuration: CloudFormation primarily deals with provisioning and orchestration of infrastructure resources based on the defined templates, ensuring the correct resource configuration and dependencies. It helps in creating and managing stacks of resources, including EC2 instances, RDS databases, S3 buckets, etc. In contrast, AWS Config focuses more on the configuration aspects of the resources, tracking their compliance with desired configurations, and detecting configuration drifts.

3. Key Difference 3: Declarative vs. Continuous Monitoring: CloudFormation operates in a declarative manner, allowing you to define the desired state of your infrastructure resources in templates. It takes care of provisioning resources and ensuring the infrastructure matches the defined state. AWS Config, on the other hand, provides continuous monitoring, capturing real-time configuration changes and maintaining a configuration history. It helps in identifying and addressing any deviations from the desired state.

4. Key Difference 4: Infrastructure as Code vs. Resource Configuration History: CloudFormation empowers you to treat infrastructure as code, enabling version control, change management, and reuse of templates across different environments. It allows you to easily create, update, and delete stacks of resources using the AWS Management Console, CLI, or API. AWS Config, in contrast, provides a detailed configuration history for resources, allowing you to see how their configurations have changed over time, enabling compliance auditing, and troubleshooting.

5. Key Difference 5: Scope of Management: CloudFormation provides a broader scope of infrastructure management, covering various AWS services and resource types. It allows you to create complex infrastructures using pre-defined templates and customize them as per your requirements. AWS Config, on the other hand, focuses on monitoring and managing individual resource configurations, providing detailed configuration item history, evaluating resource compliance, and detecting configuration drift.

6. Key Difference 6: Automation and Remediation vs. Compliance Assessment: CloudFormation offers the automation and remediation capabilities through changesets, which allow you to preview and apply changes to your stacks in a controlled manner. It provides automatic rollback in case of stack creation or update failures. AWS Config, on the other hand, focuses on compliance assessment and tracking of resource configuration changes, allowing you to configure rules and remediation actions to ensure compliant resource configurations.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation primarily focuses on infrastructure provisioning and management through declarative templates, while AWS Config focuses on continuous monitoring and recording of resource configurations to ensure compliance and detect configuration drifts.