AWS CloudFormation vs Azure DevOps: 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 DevOps is detailed as "Services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software". Azure DevOps provides unlimited private Git hosting, cloud build for continuous integration, agile planning, and release management for continuous delivery to the cloud and on-premises. Includes broad IDE support.
AWS CloudFormation and Azure DevOps are primarily classified as "Infrastructure Build" and "Project Management" tools respectively.
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 DevOps provides the following key features:
- Agile Tools: kanban boards, backlogs, scrum boards
- Reporting: dashboards, widgets, Power BI
- Git: free private repositories, pull requests
"Automates infrastructure deployments" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CloudFormation over the competitors, whereas "Complete and powerful" was stated as the key factor in picking Azure DevOps.
According to the StackShare community, AWS CloudFormation has a broader approval, being mentioned in 197 company stacks & 77 developers stacks; compared to Azure DevOps, which is listed in 79 company stacks and 68 developer stacks.
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 Azure DevOps
- Crap4