Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
AWS CloudFormation vs Vagrant: What are the differences?
Introduction: In comparing AWS CloudFormation and Vagrant, it is important to highlight the key differences between these two infrastructure provisioning tools.
Flexibility: AWS CloudFormation is a service provided by Amazon Web Services for managing and provisioning resources in the cloud, while Vagrant is an open-source tool for building and managing virtual machine environments locally. CloudFormation offers more flexibility in terms of managing resources, scaling, and automation within the AWS ecosystem, while Vagrant is primarily used for local development environments.
Scope: AWS CloudFormation is focused on managing resources within the AWS cloud infrastructure, allowing users to define infrastructure as code using JSON or YAML templates. On the other hand, Vagrant is focused on creating and managing virtual machine environments across a variety of providers, including VirtualBox, VMware, and AWS.
Portability: Vagrant offers greater portability in terms of being able to deploy consistent development environments across different providers and platforms. Users can easily share Vagrant configurations and boxes, allowing for seamless replication of development environments. In contrast, AWS CloudFormation templates are specific to the AWS ecosystem and may not be as easily portable to other cloud providers.
Automation: AWS CloudFormation provides built-in automation capabilities for deploying and managing resources within the AWS ecosystem, allowing for infrastructure changes to be made programmatically. Vagrant, while capable of automating the provisioning of virtual machine environments, may require additional tools or scripts to achieve the same level of automation within cloud environments outside of AWS.
Integration: AWS CloudFormation integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, allowing users to easily provision resources and manage dependencies within the AWS ecosystem. Vagrant, while versatile in its ability to work with different providers, may not offer the same level of integration with cloud services and features as CloudFormation within the AWS environment.
Scalability: AWS CloudFormation is designed to handle large-scale deployments and infrastructure management within the AWS cloud, offering features such as stack updates, drift detection, and resource rollback capabilities. Vagrant, on the other hand, is more suited for smaller-scale deployments and local development environments, lacking the advanced scalability features provided by CloudFormation.
In Summary, AWS CloudFormation and Vagrant differ in terms of flexibility, scope, portability, automation, integration, and scalability, with CloudFormation being more tailored to managing resources within the AWS cloud ecosystem while Vagrant focuses on local development environments and multi-provider support.
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 AWS CloudFormation
- Automates infrastructure deployments43
- Declarative infrastructure and deployment21
- No more clicking around13
- Any Operative System you want3
- Atomic3
- Infrastructure as code3
- CDK makes it truly infrastructure-as-code1
- Automates Infrastructure Deployment1
- K8s0
Pros of Vagrant
- Development environments352
- Simple bootstraping290
- Free237
- Boxes139
- Provisioning130
- Portable84
- Synced folders81
- Reproducible69
- Ssh51
- Very flexible44
- Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs5
- Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration5
- Great3
- Just works3
- Quick way to get running2
- DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"1
- Container Friendly1
- What is vagrant?1
- Good documentation1
Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions
Cons of AWS CloudFormation
- Brittle4
- No RBAC and policies in templates2
Cons of Vagrant
- Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)2
- Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space2
- Development environment that kills your battery1
Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions
What is AWS CloudFormation?
What is Vagrant?
Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!
What companies use AWS CloudFormation?
Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions
What tools integrate with AWS CloudFormation?
What tools integrate with Vagrant?
Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions
Blog Posts
+29
+42+47
+26
+33
+23+27
+39