I’ve been very positive about AWS CloudFormation (both in tweet and blog form) since its announcement . I want to clarify that it’s not the technology that excites me. There’s nothing earth-shattering in it. CloudFormation only covers deployment and doesn’t help you with configuration, monitoring, diagnostic and ongoing lifecycle. It’s been done before (including probably a half-dozen times within IBM alone, I would guess). We’ve had much more powerful and flexible frameworks for a long time (I can’t even remember when SmartFrog first came out). And we’ve had frameworks with better tools (though history suggests that tools for CloudFormation are already in the works, not necessarily inside Amazon).
Here are some non-technical reasons why I tweeted that “I have a feeling that the AWS CloudFormation format might become an even more fundamental de-facto standard than the EC2 API” even before trying it out.
It’s simple to use. There are two main reasons for this (and the fact that it uses JSON rather than XML is not one of them):
– It only support a small set of features
– It “hard-codes” resource types (e.g. EC2, Beanstalk, RDS…) rather than focusing on an abstract and extensible mechanism
It combines a format and an API. You’d think it’s obvious that the two are complementary. What can you do with a format if you don’t have an API to exchange documents in that format? Well, turns out there are lots of free-floating model formats out there for which there is no defined API. And they are still wondering why they never saw any adoption.
It merges IaaS and PaaS. AWS has always defied the “IaaS vs. PaaS” view of the Cloud. By bridging both, CloudFormation is a great way to provide a smooth transition. I expect most of the early templates to be very EC2-centric (are as most AWS deployments) and over time to move to a pattern in which EC2 resources are just used for what doesn’t fit in more specialized containers).
It comes at the right time. It picks the low-hanging fruits of the AWS automation ecosystem. The evangelism and proof of concept for templatized deployments have already taken place.
It provides a natural grouping of the various AWS resources you are currently consuming. They are now part of an explicit deployment context.
It’s free (the resources provisioned are not free, of course, but the fact that they came out of a CloudFormation deployment doesn’t change the cost).