Yesterday I blogged about AWS AMIs and Oracle VM templates. These are great mechanisms to stand up an initial cloud environment. However, they don't provide the capability to manage, provision and update an environment once it is up and running. This is where AWS Cloud Formations and Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder comes into play. In a way, these tools/frameworks pick up where AMIs and VM templates leave off.
Once again, there a similar offers from AWS and Oracle that compliant and also overlap with each other. Let's start by looking at the definitions:
AWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators an easy way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in an orderly and predictable fashion.
AWS CloudFormations

Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder - Oracle Virtual Assembly Builder makes it possible for administrators to quickly configure and provision entire multi-tier enterprise applications onto virtualized and cloud environments.
Oracle VM Builder

As with the discussion around should you use AMI or VM Templates, there are pros and cons to each:
1. CloudFormation is JSON, Assembly Builder is GUI and CLI
2. VM Templates can be used in any private or public cloud environment. Of course, CloudFormations is tied to AWS public cloud