A fully containerized setup allows one to use something like Kubernetes to do such orchestration.

K8s is getting pretty easy to setup these days.

I was asking about once your bare metal capacity reaches its limit. At some point you need to provision more bare metal and expand the total resources kubernetes can consume with docker.

Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

The bare metal equivalent would be to buy something that can handle the peak load from the start, right?

>Cloudformation, to me at least, is the power to expand resources for large traffic events. Most of the time you can get by with a small amount of instances but its nice when it scales up to hundreds of instances in minutes.

This is not what CloudFormation does. CloudFormation allows a declarative way to express a group of AWS resources to be created and coupled together. There's nothing that's quite exactly the same as CloudFormation, but stock Kubernetes is quite close, since you effectively describe what resources you want in individual declarative YAML/JSON files. However, there's nothing standard in Kubernetes for coupling them together into one thing equivalent to a Stack in CloudFormation.

Maybe we are talking about different things, but I use CloudFormation to autoscale ec2 instances based on avg CPU load over a period of time

http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuid...