&gt; <i>There is no reason why you should manage your infrastructure manually. It&#x27;s unprofessional! It&#x27;s a mess!</i><p>Nonsense. Cloudformation has it&#x27;s issues. It takes time to learn and implement. The templates can break, requiring the stack to be destroyed and remade. In the sample in the article, the database is in the same template as everything else - what fun that will be when an update breaks the template and you have to reapply the stack (which destroys the existing database).<p>Cloudformation is good, but it comes with caveats, and the idea that you should <i>only</i> manage an AWS stack with CF is utter tripe. As with everything, it depends on your use case.<p>Also weird is the article&#x27;s demand of using autoscaling groups to monitor single instances. Why not just monitor them directly with cloudwatch?<p>&gt; <i>There is no reason - beside manually managed infrastructure - to not decrease the instance size (number of machines or c3.xlarge to c3.large) if you realize that your EC2 instances are underutilized.</i><p>This is wrong, too. Autoscaling takes time to scale up, and it scales up in stages. If you get sudden traffic, autoscaling can take too long. Again, it&#x27;s about knowing your use case. Unfortunately for us, we can get sudden traffic when one of our clients does a media release and they don&#x27;t tell us ahead of time, The five or so minutes it takes for instances to trigger the warning, start up a new set, and then attach these to a load balancer is too long for this particular use case, so we just have to run with a certain amount of excess capacity.<p>Autoscaling is awesome, but this article is <i>way</i> too didactic in it&#x27;s No True Scotsman approach.