AWS CloudFormation vs CircleCI

Overview

CircleCI

Stacks14.5K

Followers7.1K

Votes974

AWS CloudFormation

Stacks1.6K

Followers1.3K

Votes88

AWS CloudFormation vs CircleCI: What are the differences?

AWS CloudFormation: 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; CircleCI: Automate your development process quickly, safely, and at scale. 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.

AWS CloudFormation can be classified as a tool in the "Infrastructure Build Tools" category, while CircleCI is grouped under "Continuous Integration".

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, CircleCI provides the following key features:

Language-Inclusive Support
Custom Environments
Flexible Resource Allocation

"Automates infrastructure deployments" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CloudFormation over the competitors, whereas "Github integration" was stated as the key factor in picking CircleCI.

Instacart, Lyft, and StackShare are some of the popular companies that use CircleCI, whereas AWS CloudFormation is used by TimeHop, Custora, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. CircleCI has a broader approval, being mentioned in 925 company stacks & 372 developers stacks; compared to AWS CloudFormation, which is listed in 195 company stacks and 75 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on CircleCI, AWS CloudFormation

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

Somnath

Engineering Leader at Altimetrik Corp.

Jun 25, 2020

Needs adviceon

CircleCI

Drone.io

GitHub Actions

I am in the process of evaluating CircleCI, Drone.io, and GitHub Actions to cover my #CI/ #CD needs. I would appreciate your advice on comparative study w.r.t. attributes like language-Inclusive support, code-base integration, performance, cost, maintenance, support, ease of use, ability to deal with big projects, etc. based on actual industry experience.

Thanks in advance!

1.82M views1.82M

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

Detailed Comparison

CircleCI	AWS CloudFormation
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.	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.
Language-Inclusive Support;Custom Environments;Flexible Resource Allocation;SSH Or Local Builds For Easy Debugging;Improved Caching;Unmatched Security;Parallelism;Insights	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
Stacks 14.5K	Stacks 1.6K
Followers 7.1K	Followers 1.3K
Votes 974	Votes 88
Pros & Cons
Pros 226 Github integration 177 Easy setup 153 Fast builds 94 Competitively priced 74 Slack integration Cons 12 Unstable 6 Scammy pricing structure 0 Aggressive Github permissions	Pros 43 Automates infrastructure deployments 21 Declarative infrastructure and deployment 13 No more clicking around 3 Any Operative System you want 3 Infrastructure as code Cons 4 Brittle 2 No RBAC and policies in templates
Integrations
dotCloud GitHub Xcode Azure Container Service Slack Heroku JavaScript Node.js Python Amazon EC2	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to CircleCI, AWS CloudFormation?

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.

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.

Snap CI

Snap CI is a cloud-based continuous integration & continuous deployment tool with powerful deployment pipelines. Integrates seamlessly with GitHub and provides fast feedback so you can deploy with ease.

Related Comparisons

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, CircleCI provides the following key features:

Language-Inclusive Support
Custom Environments
Flexible Resource Allocation

AWS CloudFormation vs CircleCI