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."I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"The product has eased the deployment of Microsoft apps to the devices. We can manage it properly. We can control it and push the updates. Another company helped us with the deployment. However, we can do it internally."
"Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"One of the most valuable aspects of Microsoft Intune is its seamless integration with Azure Active Directory, offering capabilities akin to Group Policy Objects."
"The many policies available in Microsoft Intune for managing our devices are valuable."
"Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"Conditional access has helped us tailor and enforce our security policies in the mobile space."
"It provides control over all mobile devices that are being connected to the corporate network."
"It allows defining the infrastructure as code using templates, which describe the desired state of the infrastructure."
"It is easy to work from the console and deploy new database services."
"With CloudFormation, there is no need to use complicated coding."
"What I found most valuable in AWS CloudFormation is its configurability. The solution is easy to configure. I also like its change management configuration because that's also good."
"CloudFormation itself is free to use. You will be charged for the resources you deploy using CloudFormation."
"The reusability of the solution is valuable."
"The most valuable features of AWS CloudFormation are all the resources documentation is located in one location, simple resource reverting, and ease of use of the full package for new users."
"Its ability to treat infrastructure's code is valuable. It makes things automatable and reproducible."
"The most valuable features of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform are the agentless platform and writing the code is simple using the Yaml computer language."
"The most valuable features of the solution are its configuration management, drift management, workflow templates with the visual UI, and graphical workflow representation."
"We can manage all the configuration consistency between all our servers."
"It has an easy-to-use interface. It is REST API driven, and it integrates with Active Directory. It provides the ability to grant permissions to other users who would not necessarily have those permissions via the GUI so that they could run other people's jobs. For example, you could have the Oracle team grant permissions to the Linux team so that they can use each of those playbooks or each other's code. It is called shift-left."
"The automation manager is very good."
"Being a game-changer in configuration management software is what has made Ansible so popular and widespread. Much of IT is based on SSH direct connectivity with a need for running infrastructure in an agentless way, and that has been a big plus. SSH has become a great security standard for managing servers. The whole thing has really become an out-of-the-box solution for managing a Unix estate."
"This solution allows us to stitch a lot of different parts of the workflow together."
"The Organizations feature, where I can give clear silos and hand them over to different teams, that's amazing; everybody says that it's their own Tower. It's like they have their own Tower out there."
"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."
"There are a couple of issues with stability."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"One area for improvement is app deployment. Another is the Windows update rollout. If you're rolling out an object to a device that's offline, Intune stops trying to reach this device after it sits idle for a bit. We are forced to find a workaround that could help manage that."
"Integrating certain group policies can be challenging and may necessitate using on-premises systems to integrate them with Microsoft Intune."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"From a new user's perspective, it may be a little overwhelming because there are quite a few things to look at in the console, however, once you are sort of acclimated and are familiar with your core functions, it's fairly simple and straightforward."
"An area for improvement is the absence of seamless integration, particularly with external dashboards."
"The product should be made cloud-agnostic, allowing users to deploy the same environment with minimal tweaks across different cloud platforms, similar to Terraform. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have the ability to manage templates outside of the AWS environment."
"There could be better error handling. It would be a good way to improve the solution."
"It would help all users if AWS improved the auto-generation of the CloudFormation file."
"The conditions that can be added in AWS CloudFormation are not as powerful as any programming language."
"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."
"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."
"Creating the inline policies is not great."
"GUI could be improved by adding graphical components."
"If we have a problem with some file and we need to get Red Hat to analyze the issue and the file is 100GBs, we'll have an issue since we need to provide a log file for them to analyze. If it is around 12GB or 13GB, we can easily upload it to the Red Hat portal. With more than 100GBs, it will fail. I heard it should cover up to 250GB for an upload, however, I find it fails. Therefore, Red Hat needs to provide a way to handle this."
"We are not using the Dashboard a lot because we have higher expectations from it. The default Dashboard from Tower doesn't give that much information. We really want to get down into more than if the job succeeded or what was the percentage of success. We want to get down to task-level success. If, in a job, there are ten tasks, we want to see this task was a success, and this was not, and how many were not. That's the kind of granularity we are looking for, that Tower does not give right now."
"From Red Hat Insights point of view, the product is not on top as it is not responding as per the demand...Like on cloud platforms, you can see the main parts of Red Hat Insights, along with the inventory of all your apps. So, that is missing in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"Additional features could be added."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"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."
"They should think of this product as an end-to-end solution and begin to develop it that way."
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 "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". 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.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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.
