We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Microsoft Endpoint Manager is not expensive overall, especially for small environments."
"It has improve our organization through the remote management of non-domain joined devices."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"The solution is easy to use and it has good performance."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"The overall user experience is quite nice. I have no complaints from end users regarding their devices enrolled in Intune."
"The synchronization of Intune with other Microsoft solutions is a valuable feature."
"It helps implement conditional access policies to restrict mobile users from accessing potentially dangerous emails."
"The solution has helped with automation. I don't have to worry about provisioning machines and ensuring everything is set up. AWS CloudFormation takes care of the entire infrastructure for me."
"There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides."
"The nested stacks would be one of the more valuable features."
"AWS CloudFormation has automated the resource-building process, thereby removing the scope of human errors. We can tag the resources which help the billing process."
"The integration of the solution is very good."
"Automations make it pretty easy to provision AWS, development, or deployment environments."
"It is easy to work from the console and deploy new database services."
"I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We use it every day."
"The most valuable feature of Ansible is repeatability because when you're working at the DoD, you want things to be cookie-cutter and replicable."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"RBAC is great around Organizations and I can use that backend as our lab. Ingesting stuff into the JSON logs, into any sort of logging collector; it works with Splunk and there are other collectors as well. It supports Sumo and that helps, I can go create reports in Sumo Logic. Workflows are an interesting feature. I can collect a lot of templates and create a workflow out of them."
"I like Ansible's ease of use. If you have Linux skills, you can create a reusable template for the dependencies and other configurations. I can store the templates in a repository and share them with my customers or other developers. It's a popular solution, so there is a large user base that can share templates."
"It enabled me to take the old build manifest and automated everything. So when it came time to spin everything up, it was quick and simple. I could spin it up and test it out. And then, when it came time to roll production, it was a done deal. When we expanded to multiple data centers, it was same thing: Change a few IP addresses, change some names, and off we went."
"We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers."
"I like the inventory management. It's a very nice, simple, concise way to keep all that data together. And the API allows us to use it even for things that are not Ansible."
"Ansible is agentless. So, we don't need to set up any agent into the computer we are interacting with. The only prerequisite is that the host with which we are going to interact must have the Python interpreter installed on it. We can connect to a host and do our configuration by using Ansible."
"It would be beneficial to have a more straightforward understanding of Intune's capabilities, presented in a simplified manner."
"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"Microsoft Intune lacks the ability to provide seamless remote assistance or remote control."
"Intune should be much more granular in terms of supporting more Android cellular devices."
"I wanted to check if there is any provision at the Intune level to restrict certain things, such as a website, but unfortunately, that feature is available only in Microsoft Defender. Intune has web filtering capabilities, but they are only useful for protection from malicious websites, whereas we would like to be able to restrict a website. For example, YouTube is a clean website. No one would identify it as a malicious website, but if we want to stop the end-users from going to that website, we have to go for another product, such as Microsoft Defender or another third-party proxy solution. It would be great if this capability is included in Intune."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"What would make this product better is adding more security policies and features in the next upgrade."
"There is less support for on-premise environments."
"CloudFormation is not particularly good at handling cross-account dynamic references. If you try to refer to an object that CloudFormation has created in a separate AWS account, it tends to fall apart. That's because it is a byproduct of the multi-tenant configuration. This is the most glaring shortcoming in my perspective because you can't dynamically reference objects in other accounts that CloudFormation has created, but it is not a shortcoming that you can't overcome. This is the only pain point that I've come across that didn't have a workaround natively. Sometimes the confirmation is slow, and it could be faster. The downside to CloudFormation when you're fully embracing it is that the AWS services do not get released immediately fully CloudFormation enabled. If you need to use the latest AWS service that just got announced or reinvented, you're not going to be able to continue with CloudFormation for the first X number of months. This is because they develop the products separately, and then they hand it to the CloudFormation team, which later on develops a CloudFormation integration. So, if you need to be on the newest thing AWS has, CloudFormation is often going to be a constraint that prevents you from doing that."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"Provisioning a large environment or a large number of services takes a bit more time than with Terraform."
"AWS CloudFormation allows you to use the code templates written in JSON and YAML, but not directly in Python. Adding this feature would be beneficial."
"For improvement, it's crucial that AWS provides options in terms of computing services, DB related services, and machine learning solutions. If I'm not hands-on with a particular service, like machine learning applications, I struggle to write the CloudFormation code."
"The code we write in AWS CloudFormation is pretty big compared to Terraform. We need to have more modules in the solution. A library should also be there where we can save code lines. A dashboard feature would be good for designers."
"What could be improved in AWS CloudFormation is its user interface, in terms of graphical design, I prefer WYSIWYG."
"The area which I feel can be improved is the custom modules. For example, there are something like 106 official modules available in the Ansible library. A year ago, that number was somewhere around 58. While Ansible is improving day by day, this can be improved more. For instance, when you need to configure in the cloud, you need to write up a module for that."
"Some of the modules in Ansible could be a bit more mature. There is still a little room for further development. Some performance aspects could be improved, perhaps in the form of parallelism within Ansible."
"It needs better documentation."
"There is always room for improvement in features or customer support."
"It would be helpful to have templates for common configurations. It would make it much easier and faster rather than creating a whole script. The templates would decrease the learning curve as well."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"The user interface on the Ansible Tower product could be better, but it is functional."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of AWS CloudFormation writes "Pretty easy setup with great automations for provisioning that save time and money". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform writes "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Chef, whereas Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is most compared with Red Hat Satellite, Microsoft Configuration Manager, VMware Aria Automation, Microsoft Azure DevOps and BMC TrueSight Server Automation. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform report.
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