Which of the following statements best describes the differences between Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation?

You need to develop and run some new applications on AWS and you know that Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation can both help as a deployment mechanism for a broad range of AWS resources.

Which of the following statements best describes the differences between Elastic Beanstalk and CloudFormation?
A . Elastic Beanstalk uses Elastic load balancing and CloudFormation doesn’t.
B . CloudFormation is faster in deploying applications than Elastic Beanstalk.
C . Elastic Beanstalk is faster in deploying applications than CloudFormation.
D . CloudFormation is much more powerful than Elastic Beanstalk, because you can actually design and script custom resources

Answer: D

Explanation:

These services are designed to complement each other. AWS Elastic Beanstalk provides an environment to easily develop and run applications in the cloud. It is integrated with developer tools and provides a one-stop experience for you to manage the lifecycle of your applications. AWS CloudFormation is a convenient deployment mechanism for a broad range of AWS resources. It supports the infrastructure needs of many different types of applications such as existing enterprise applications, legacy applications, applications built using a variety of AWS resources and container-based solutions (including those built using AWS Elastic Beanstalk).

AWS CloudFormation introduces two new concepts: The template, a JSON-format, text-based file that describes all the AWS resources you need to deploy to run your application and the stack, the set of AWS resources that are created and managed as a single unit when AWS CloudFormation instantiates a template.

Reference: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudformation/faqs/