Cloudformation extra when compared with Chef

Question

What can I do with Cloudformation that I can not do with chef? It looks like chef support spawning node in the ec2 and I can read back the information of the spawned nodes (ip,..) so why would still need cloudformation for?

Answer 1

Very little, but what it does makes it worth using.

The primary advantage of CloudFormation is that Amazon ties created resources together. In other words if your application comprises a db, four webservers, an autoscaling group, a launch configuration, ingress rules, some VPC subnets, an internet gateway or two, and a VPN connection, you can manage them in a single place, as a CloudFormation stack. Want to shoot them? That's easy. Kill the stack and every resource dies with it.

Sure you could technically do this with Chef and the Amazon API. CloudFormation is little more than a way of generating extremely sophisticated sets of AWS API calls + Magic (tm), so you could always roll your own. Netflix sort of did that with their OS tool, Asgard, and RightScale and other services are more or less that. If those softwares don't meet your needs or if you can't afford them, CloudFormation is a nice supplement to AWS deployments. In fact, you don't even need to rely on it. It's quite simple to launch chef-solo from CloudFormation, which allows you to leverage the advantages of both.