Amazon Web Services announced AWS CloudFormation, which lets developers and system admins use recipes to create and provision resources in Amazon cloud. This is conceptually similar to Opscode’s Chef Recipes which lets ops folks configure some aspect of the systems in their ecosystem. Clearly, AWS must have seen how Chef (and, of course, cfengine and puppet) has changed the configuration management landscape and wanted to do something which will help baking clouds much easier. CloudFormation is a right step in this direction.
With CloudFormation, developers can either use templates available in the library or create their own templates to describe AWS resources and the associated runtime needs of their application without worrying about the order in which the AWS resources should be provisioned and, also, making the provisioning work seamlessly with live applications without any disruption.
AWS CloudFormation supports many AWS resources including EC2, EBS Volumes, Load Balancers, Elastic IP, Security and Autoscaling Groups, Elastic Beanstalk, Cloudwatch Alarms, RDS, SimpleDB, SNS, etc.. They have also released recipes to install some of the open source applications like WordPress, Drupa, tracks, Redmine, Joomla, etc.. With just a few configuration details like the type of EC2 instance, autoscaling limits, etc. one can easily get these applications running in minutes.
AWS CloudFormation is definitely the next logical evolution for Amazon. This also gives them an opportunity to try and lock in their customers inside their ecosystem. If anyone expected them not to take this step, they are being naive about how business is done in this competitive world. Amazon is doing everything right to stay as the largest cloud player in the market. However, I do think that it doesn’t bode well for the players in the AWS ecosystem.
Some pundits see this as a direct threat to Chef and Puppet but it is definitely not the case. Chef and Puppet are more focussed on configuration management and are not reliant on AWS in any way. However, it does affect some large players like Rightscale and smaller ones like Bitnami . Even though their businesses are not entirely reliant on AWS alone, it does highlight the risk of any provider being reliant on a single cloud provider ecosystem, especially ambitious ones like Amazon. Do you think tt is yet another wake up call for anyone wanting to build a business around AWS Cloud?
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