Does using AWS CloudFormation incurs charges if I'm on the Free Tier?

Question

I am on the free tier on AWS and wanted to create a CloudFormation template. For that I found that I can use CloudFormation, however it seems creating EC2 instance.

Will this cost me money if I'm on the Free Tier? Also why does it need to create an EC2 instance?

Answer 1

There will be a cost if it creates something other than a t2.micro instance. If it can use a t2.micro then you could shutdown your current t2.micro (if you have one running) while the CloudFormer server runs.

It needs to create an EC2 instance because all it is is a Ruby script that queries your AWS account. The last time I tried it it was very out of date and missing support for lots of AWS services. It was also slow and buggy and was a pain to get it to complete without errors. It's a shame they can't just release the script and you could run it however you saw fit. Or better yet they should build this feature directly into the CloudFormation console.

Answer 2

The free tier simply means that for a limited time period you have access to some free resources. These include some use of a t2.micro instance, some s3 bucket space, limited use of DynamoDB tables and other specific things.

Here are some details about the free tier

You specifically asked about using a Cloudformation template to make a Cloudformation stack

Cloudformation pricing works like this (see https://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/pricing/ )

There is no additional charge for AWS CloudFormation. You pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation in the same manner as if you created them manually.

So, if the things that the Cloudformation template wants to make are in the free tier, they are free. If they are not, you will be charged

Cloudformation shows estimated charges before making the stack of items from the template, see this page for details of how to get the estimates

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/using-cfn-paying.html