AWS CloudFormation vs AWS CodeDeploy

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AWS CloudFormation

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AWS CloudFormation vs AWS CodeDeploy: What are the differences?

Introduction

This Markdown code provides a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodeDeploy, focusing on their key differences. Both services are part of the Amazon Web Services ecosystem and are used for different purposes in the deployment and management of applications and infrastructure.

  1. Deployment Process: AWS CloudFormation is a service that allows users to define their infrastructure and provisioning resources in a declarative manner using templates. It enables the consistent creation and management of resources, such as EC2 instances, S3 buckets, and RDS databases, through a JSON or YAML script. On the other hand, AWS CodeDeploy is a fully managed deployment service that automates the application deployment to Amazon EC2 instances or on-premises servers. It focuses on application-level deployments by providing advanced features like blue/green deployments and canary deployments.

  2. Scope: AWS CloudFormation operates at the infrastructure level and allows for the provisioning of various AWS resources and services. It supports the creation and configuration of networks, security groups, load balancers, and more. AWS CodeDeploy, on the other hand, focuses solely on application-level deployments. It helps in deploying code changes and coordinating the application deployment process across fleets of instances or servers.

  3. Rollback Mechanism: AWS CloudFormation provides a built-in rollback mechanism in case of errors or failures during the stack creation or update process. It can automatically roll back changes to the previous known working state. AWS CodeDeploy also offers a rollback mechanism but is primarily focused on application-level rollback. It allows the rollback of application revisions to a previous version or an earlier stage, providing a convenient way to revert problematic deployments.

  4. Integration with Development Tools: AWS CloudFormation plays a crucial role in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices and integrates well with various development tools. It can be used with integrated development environments (IDEs) like AWS Cloud9 or other popular code editors to manage infrastructure definitions. AWS CodeDeploy integrates more closely with software development tools like AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodePipeline, and third-party platforms such as Jenkins, enabling end-to-end automation of application deployments and continuous delivery workflows.

  5. Supported Environments: AWS CloudFormation is agnostic to the type of workload or application being deployed. It supports both infrastructure deployments and application deployments. AWS CodeDeploy, on the other hand, is specifically designed for application deployments. It provides support for a variety of application types, including web applications, microservices, and legacy monolithic applications.

  6. Deployment Target Types: AWS CloudFormation can deploy resources to various AWS accounts and regions, enabling multi-account and multi-region deployments. It helps in managing complex architectures. AWS CodeDeploy primarily targets EC2 instances and on-premises servers. It can deploy the application revisions across fleets of instances, allowing for easier scaling and management in complex deployments.

In summary, AWS CloudFormation focuses on infrastructure provisioning and management using declarative templates, while AWS CodeDeploy is primarily geared towards application deployments and provides advanced deployment features like blue/green deployments and canary deployments.

Decisions about AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodeDeploy

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.

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Sergey Ivanov
Overview

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.

Advantages

Terraform 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.

Disadvantages

Software 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.

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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.
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Arthur Boghossian
DevOps Engineer at PlayAsYouGo · | 2 upvotes · 47.5K views

We will use AWS CloudFormation, as it is ideal for deploying and replicating infrastructure as code. Amazon CloudWatch Events will be used to send info based on the trigger that initiated the event to developers using Amazon SNS. Amazon SNS will also be used in the AWS CodePipeline after the application has been tested and deployed successfully to the development environment, notifying users to approve the application before it can be deployed to a production environment. AWS CodeBuild will be used for running tests on the application and AWS CodeDeploy will be used to deploy the application to Lambda and Alexa Skills Kit. AWS CodePipeline is a service that will organize the steps taken (building/testing and deployment) when code is pushed to the master branch in our source repository in Github.

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Pros of AWS CloudFormation
Pros of AWS CodeDeploy
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Any Operative System you want
  • 3
    Atomic
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
  • 1
    CDK makes it truly infrastructure-as-code
  • 1
    Automates Infrastructure Deployment
  • 0
    K8s
  • 17
    Automates code deployments
  • 9
    Backed by Amazon
  • 7
    Adds autoscaling lifecycle hooks
  • 5
    Git integration

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Cons of AWS CloudFormation
Cons of AWS CodeDeploy
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
    Be the first to leave a con

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    What is AWS CloudFormation?

    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.

    What is AWS CodeDeploy?

    AWS CodeDeploy is a service that automates code deployments to Amazon EC2 instances. AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for you to rapidly release new features, helps you avoid downtime during deployment, and handles the complexity of updating your applications.

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    What companies use AWS CloudFormation?
    What companies use AWS CodeDeploy?
    See which teams inside your own company are using AWS CloudFormation or AWS CodeDeploy.
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    What tools integrate with AWS CloudFormation?
    What tools integrate with AWS CodeDeploy?

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    What are some alternatives to AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodeDeploy?
    Chef
    Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
    Terraform
    With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
    AWS Elastic Beanstalk
    Once you upload your application, Elastic Beanstalk automatically handles the deployment details of capacity provisioning, load balancing, auto-scaling, and application health monitoring.
    AWS Config
    AWS Config is a fully managed service that provides you with an AWS resource inventory, configuration history, and configuration change notifications to enable security and governance. With AWS Config you can discover existing AWS resources, export a complete inventory of your AWS resources with all configuration details, and determine how a resource was configured at any point in time. These capabilities enable compliance auditing, security analysis, resource change tracking, and troubleshooting.
    Azure Resource Manager
    It is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.
    See all alternatives