AWS CloudFormation
Shares rank 6 of 10 IaC tools by recommenders
Recommended for managing AWS infrastructure as code and free to use, though people find rollbacks, deployment speed and YAML or JSON templates frustrating.
Recommended for managing AWS infrastructure as code and free to use, though people find rollbacks, deployment speed and YAML or JSON templates frustrating.
23 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 8
- criticize it
- 15
- approval share
- 35%
Recommended in 6 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: recommended
- March 2026: recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: not recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 8 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.5 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 6 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Works with AWS CDK
“to make CloudFormation usable, it is written in typescript, and generates the templates on the fly”
Comment from 17 Nov 2025 in “How when AWS was down, we were not” “I'd rather just use the AWS CDK and CloudFormation.”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS” Preferred over other IaC tools
“learning something arguably better, like Cloudformation / Terraform / SST”
Comment from 5 Nov 2025 in “I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars” “I'd rather just use the AWS CDK and CloudFormation.”
Comment from 2 Feb 2026 in “Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Poor rollbacks and failure handling
“It's not the best "control plane" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.”
Comment from 10 Aug 2026 in “BYOC Is Not Just 'Deploy into Their Cloud'” “the fact that its failure modes often leave you in a state that feels extremely dangerous”
Comment from 6 Feb 2026 in “GitHub Actions Is Slowly Killing Your Engineering Team” “Failed deployments without rollbacks still leave you in a unusable state”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run” Slow deployments
“cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason”
Comment from 24 Mar 2026 in “Local Stack Archived their GitHub repo and requires an account to run” “CloudFormation is also not particularly fast”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “The future of Terraform CDK” Hard-to-read YAML and JSON templates
“yaml is a terrible format for the knowledge encoded in these artifacts”
Comment from 16 Jun 2026 in “What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes” “Cloud formation is not human friendly as JSON or YAML.”
Comment from 10 May 2026 in “I returned to AWS, and was reminded why I left” Many prefer other IaC tools
“You don't need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi”
Comment from 3 Mar 2026 in “What Are Your Guilty Displeasures?” “it's good too, even for me much better than CF or Terraform”
Comment from 3 Feb 2026 in “Stelvio: Ship Python to AWS” “I like to avoid cloudformation as much as possible.”
Comment from 11 Dec 2025 in “The future of Terraform CDK”
Other IaC tools people recommend
The four most recommended other IaC tools, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
See all 10 IaC tools, rankedWhat people said
29 of the 30 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“they want everything to be built into CloudFormation so that when a server is misbehaving you pull a switch”
“Some of them are cheap (CloudFormation is free!) but in general they seem like expensive alternatives”
“It's not the best "control plane" as far as updates and rollbacks go, but it works pretty well for our needs.”
“yaml is a terrible format for the knowledge encoded in these artifacts”
“Cloud formation is not human friendly as JSON or YAML.”
“CloudFormation and ECS are bright yellow flags for me”
“I know CloudFormation for infrastructure as code well and started using it in 2017.”
“Failed deployments without rollbacks still leave you in a unusable state”
“It's never taken 30 minutes to pass in a new parameter value for the Docker container.”
“cloudformation deployments take inordinate amounts of time for seemingly no reason”
“cloudformation being horribly slow”
“because it doesn’t use state files”
“deletion protection, and the hug of death are quite nice to have for making things feel safer”
“You don't need Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi”
“It's a quirk of how it tree-shakes, if nothing dereferences the attribute, it deletes the export.”
“the fact that its failure modes often leave you in a state that feels extremely dangerous”
“This is roughly how I feel about cloudformation.”
“it's good too, even for me much better than CF or Terraform”
“They are getting much better now”
“CDK is layer on top of cloud formation”
“I'd rather just use the AWS CDK and CloudFormation.”
“took some going back and forth with infrastructure as code”
“CFN, which is a dog's breakfast and has no visibility on what's happening under the covers.”
“CF feels like a series of PM requirements dutifully codified with no dogfooding”
“I like to avoid cloudformation as much as possible.”
“CloudFormation is also not particularly fast”
“it's still too technical and obscure.”
“to make CloudFormation usable, it is written in typescript, and generates the templates on the fly”
“learning something arguably better, like Cloudformation / Terraform / SST”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.