What is the difference between Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation for a .NET project?

Question

I have developed a .NET MVC application and have started playing around with AWS and deploying it via the Visual Studio Toolkit. I have successfully deployed the application usi

Answer 1

Cloud Formation is a service that lets you deploy AWS services. You create a template file that describes which services you want. When you deploy that template, Cloud Formation creates the resources for you as a "package". All the resources you defined in your template are started and terminated together. Examples of types of resources that can be created with Cloud Formation are: S3, EC2 instances, AutoScaling, DynamoDb, etc. For EC2, Cloud Formation also gives you the ability to make use of "cfn-init" scripts; which can be used in conjunction with the template to boot strap your instances.

Elastic Beanstalk uses Cloud Formation templates and scipts to: 1. Create a Load Balancer and Auto Scaling Group, 2. Copy your code to S3, 3. Bootstrap an Ec2 instance to Download the code from S3 and deploy it.

Cloud Formation is not as easy to use as EB, but it is much more powerful, because you can create resources other than EC2 instances, control how the cfn-init script, and etc.