AWS CloudFormation vs Juju

AWS CloudFormation models, provisions, and manages related AWS and third-party resources as infrastructure as code. YAML or JSON templates define AWS resources and their properties. StackSets deploy a common set of resources across multiple AWS accounts and Regions; Change Sets preview proposed stack updates, including possible deletion or replacement, and Drift Detection tracks changes made outside the service. For authoring, AWS CDK supports TypeScript, Python, Java, and .NET, while AWS SAM offers shorthand YAML for serverless resources that is converted during deployment. The CloudFormation Registry supports third-party resources and modules, and stacks can be updated from remote Git repositories. The service is available through API, Linux, macOS, web, and Windows, and manages state. CloudFormation itself has a free plan, with no additional charge for AWS and Alexa resource providers, but created AWS resources are billed at their standard rates. Third-party provider and custom hook operations may also incur charges. Access can be managed with IAM, and CloudTrail logs API calls.

Juju is Canonical’s open source orchestration engine for deploying, connecting and managing application lifecycles with charms. A charm packages reusable business logic to automate parts of an application’s life. Juju treats application integrations as part of lifecycle management and can manage software across public clouds, Kubernetes, virtual machines and bare metal. It can apply networking and configuration changes between applications even when they run on different clouds. Charmhub is a curated marketplace with charms for tools such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Kubeflow, Apache Spark, Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Vault, Traefik and Landscape. For enterprise use, JAAS provides a central control plane that can manage hundreds of Juju controllers. It adds fine-grained access controls, auditing and support for external identity providers through OIDC and single sign-on in the CLI and web dashboard. JAAS also has a graphical administration and monitoring dashboard. Juju is free and open source; listed platforms include Linux, macOS, Windows, API and self-hosted environments.