Which AWS services does AWS CloudFormer support?

8
votes

AWS CloudFormation offers a default stack named CloudFormer, a template creation tool. CloudFormer creates a CloudFormation template from your current AWS environment, allowing you to click which manually created resources to include in your template.

The AWS CloudFormer documentation does not list the AWS services that CloudFormer supports. There is an announcement from 2013 (CloudFormer Now Supports Amazon VPC and More AWS Resources) that lists a subset of supported services, but there is no complete list.

Which services does AWS CloudFormer support? For example, does it support commonly used severless managed services, such as AWS Lambda and AWS Cognito?

2
amazon-web-servicesaws-lambdaamazon-cloudformationamazon-cognito

2 Answers

19
votes

Sadly CloudFormer is deprecated and no longer maintained by AWS.

CloudFormer is actually a very old tool that is not maintained. It has been in "beta" for many years.

John Rotenstein Developer Advocate at Amazon Web Services May 26 '20

Thus CloudFormer is not recommended for use as its not reliable.

You can have a look at a third party tool called Former2 which seems to be much more useful and reliable than the CloudFormer:

Former2 allows you to generate Infrastructure-as-Code outputs from your existing resources within your AWS account. By making the relevant calls using the AWS JavaScript SDK, Former2 will scan across your infrastructure and present you with the list of resources for you to choose which to generate outputs for.

4
votes

AWS CloudFormer is not a complete solution for creating CloudFormation templates from your existing AWS infrastructure.

AWS CloudFormer supports a very limited subset of AWS resources, focused on Network, Compute and Storage. The vast majority of AWS managed services, such as AWS Lambda and AWS Cognito are not support. enter image description here

If you'd like to create a template of your network infrastructure (VPCs et al.) and EC2 instances, CloudFormer may be useful. If you're using other AWS managed services, you're out of luck.

Additionally, CloudFormer does not have a programmatic interface.

AWS CloudFormer's core support DNS: Route53 Network: VPC, Subnets EC2: Instances, LoadBalancer, Autoscaling, ElasticIP, SecurityGroups Storage: S3, EBS, RDS, SimpleDB, DynamoDB, ElastiCache, Redshift

Other supported services

  • CloudWatch Alarms (but not CloudWatch dashboards)
  • CloudFront
  • Elastic Beanstalk
  • Kinesis Streams
  • OpsWorks
  • SNS
  • SQS

Common services that are NOT supported by AWS CloudFormer