We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Config 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."The conditional access policies that we set up are very useful."
"The dashboards, the security, and the customization capabilities work very well for us."
"It is user-friendly, and the performance is also good. It is a convenient product"
"Microsoft's cloud comes with a lot of extra features that are free of charge."
"The stability is good."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"The tool's most valuable feature is Autopilot."
"Autopilot is the most valuable feature."
"The reusability of the solution is valuable."
"AWS Cloud automation reduces the time needed to create AWS resources."
"What I like best about AWS CloudFormation is that it is a quick and simple way to deploy various applications, like WordPress."
"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."
"The nested stacks would be one of the more valuable features."
"It is easy to work from the console and deploy new database services."
"Automations make it pretty easy to provision AWS, development, or deployment environments."
"The integration of the solution is very good."
"The initial setup is super easy, it takes like two minutes. Literally a one-click deployment."
"Installing the instances and performing upgrades is smooth and clean."
"The scalability is a ten out of ten."
"The solution is scalable and provides over 100 rules."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"Sometimes, updating a client policy is very difficult. This needs to be improved."
"There are some issues using the solution with macOS and iOS, and it offers limited granular control with them. Intune works better on Windows and Android."
"I expect Microsoft Intune to have more features in the cloud because there are two major functionalities that we need to be added. This is software metering and license management. These functionalities, for now, must be on-premise. For this purpose, we have set up a SQL Server and I hope that in near future this option will be in the cloud in Microsoft Intune."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"Technical support is not that great."
"Creating the inline policies is not great."
"They could improve the product's capability to handle circular dependencies more effectively."
"If Amazon could extend CloudFormation to other cloud platforms, that would be good. Currently, it is only limited to AWS."
"Including certain examples of templates would be advantageous."
"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."
"What could be improved in AWS CloudFormation is its user interface, in terms of graphical design, I prefer WYSIWYG."
"One area where AWS CloudFormation could improve is by offering more flexibility in creating custom templates."
"Provisioning a large environment or a large number of services takes a bit more time than with Terraform."
"There is room for improvement in built-in tools, they are not up to the mark."
"The reboot process for AWS instances could be improved. Microsoft Azure does not have this problem, so AWS could consider making their instances more robust. You would not need to reboot your instances frequently to replace the hardware and stuff. They can look for a better approach or mechanism to improve in the future. The concern is that you need to plan for the outage when you reboot an instance. You need to have a maintenance window where you can properly reboot the instance without affecting your application. When Amazon announces that you need to reboot an instance and are not ready, this becomes a problem."
"The solution is missing a configuration that can assist us when writing our programming languages."
"Improvements are needed as per customer requirements."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while AWS Config is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 4 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while AWS Config is rated 9.0. 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 AWS Config writes "A cloud solution to host application with smooth instance installation and performance upgrade". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Microsoft Configuration Manager, whereas AWS Config is most compared with AWS Systems Manager. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. AWS Config report.
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We monitor all Configuration Management reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
