Hey everyone! We're in search of alternatives to AWS Copilot CLI since it's set to be deprecated in February 2025. Copilot has been fantastic for us in managing ECS services, VPCs, networking, and deployments across various environments, and it produced clean CloudFormation templates too. Now that we're losing Copilot, we want to maintain our existing templates but need a new orchestration tool for deploying and managing them effectively—ideally without needing to rewrite everything using Terraform or CDK.
Here's what I've looked into:
1. **Sceptre** - It's structured and capable of handling multi-stack orchestration, supporting dependencies and parameters. However, it does come with a learning curve and some setup overhead.
2. **AWS Rain** - This is lightweight, allowing direct deployment of CFN templates and offering features like interactive input and change set previews. However, it lacks support for multi-stack orchestration or dependencies.
Our goals are to reuse the CloudFormation templates generated by Copilot, create and manage multiple environments (like testing, development, and production), handle networking and service stacks with potential cross-stack references, and avoid CDK or Terraform for now. I'm open to suggestions for any other native AWS tools or third-party solutions that could simplify our process without requiring a major rewrite. Thanks in advance!
3 Answers
You might want to look into NeuronSphere. It does a great job with multi-account and multi-stack management, plus it allows cross-references between various infrastructure as code providers. This could enable you to integrate CDK, CloudFormation, and custom code all in one deployment process.
Have you thought about simply sticking with plain old CloudFormation? It seems like a straightforward choice that matches your team's skills and avoids the complications that come with other tools. Terraform and CDK are great but might introduce unnecessary complexity for now. Just a thought!
Thanks for the suggestion! We are indeed sticking with CloudFormation for now as it fits our capabilities and budget constraints. Terraform and CDK are on our radar for future use as we grow!
I'm curious why you don’t want to use your existing templates directly? What's your deployment pipeline like? Also, I saw some chatter about Copilot getting deprecated, but I couldn’t find a solid source. The official GitHub page is still active, so I’d check that for updates.
Thanks for reaching out! I found some info confirming the deprecation from an AWS summit. We prefer solutions that don’t require heavy programming skills, plus the pricing for Terraform is a concern for us right now.
Thanks for the tip! I did a quick search on NeuronSphere but only found information about its platform engineering capabilities related to data.