AWS CloudFormation is the iPhone of Cloud services

Expanding on tweet that I wrote soon after the announcement of AWS CloudFormation.

The iPhone unifies the GPS, phone, PDA, camera and camcorder. CloudFormation does the same for infrastructure services (VMs, volumes, network…) and some platform services (Beanstalk, RDS, SimpleDB, SQS, SNS…). You don’t think about whether you should grab a phone or a PDA, you grab an iPhone and start using the feature you need. It’s the default tool. Similarly with CloudFormation, you won’t start by thinking about what AWS service you want to use. Rather, you grab a CloudFormation template and modify it as needed. The template (or the template editor) is the default tool.

The iPhone doesn’t just group features that used to be provided by many devices. It also allows these features to collaborate. It’s not that you get a PDA and a phone side-by-side in one device. You can press the “call” button from the “PDA” feature. CloudFormation doesn’t just bundle deployments to various AWS services, it wires them together.

Anyone can write apps for the iPhone. Anyone can write apps that use CloudFormation.

There’s an App Store for iPhone apps. On the CloudFormation side, it will probably come soon (right now Amazon has made templates available on S3, but that’s not a real store). Amazon has developed example templates for a set of common applications, but expect application authors to take ownership of that task soon. They’ll consider it one of their deliverables. Right next to the “download” button you’ll start seeing a “deploy to AWS” button. Guess which one will eventually be used the most?

It’s Apple’s platform and your applications have to comply with their policy. AWS is not as much of a control freak as Apple and doesn’t have an upfront approval process, but it has its terms of service and they too can get you kicked out.

The iPhone is not a standard platform (though you may consider it a de-facto standard). Same for AWS CloudFormation.

There are alternatives to the iPhone that define themselves primarily as being more open than it, mainly Android. Same for AWS with OpenStack (which probably will soon have its CloudFormation equivalent).

The iPhone infiltrated itself into corporations at the ground level, even if the CIO initially saw no reason to look beyond BlackBerry for corporate needs. Same with AWS.

Any other parallel? Any fundamental difference I missed?