We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation and AWS Systems Manager 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 solution has reduced the risk of security breaches by 30%."
"The policy and compliance monitoring of devices and the software deployment are most valuable."
"It supports end-users who tend to lock their devices quite frequently. Its conditional access policy helps us keep the users logged into their devices."
"The ability to switch between Affinity and non-Affinity enrollment is great."
"Easy to use."
"The ability to block and erase remote devices is valuable to us, especially when those devices are lost."
"The initial setup is not complex."
"We can manage and standardize security across your environment, identify problems, receive alerts, and so on. That's its purpose, and that's also why it's so good."
"Automations make it pretty easy to provision AWS, development, or deployment environments."
"There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides."
"Its ability to treat infrastructure's code is valuable. It makes things automatable and reproducible."
"Scripting does what we need to reinstall something from scratch."
"With CloudFormation, there is no need to use complicated coding."
"Versioning makes our work easy."
"I appreciate the flexibility of infrastructure as code. With CloudFormation, we can define ground rules, control usage limits, and scale our infrastructure up or down programmatically. Having this level of control through code on infra is a major benefit. That's the beauty of CloudFormation."
"The integration of the solution is very good."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"Has a variety of automation options."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"A new Intune feature allows application packaging, but it incurs additional licensing costs for a significant number of applications."
"Intune does not provide real-time visibility."
"In future releases, I would like to see better integration with Apple products."
"It's only good for a Microsoft environment."
"The policies we had in SCCM and AD offered features that are missing from Microsoft Intune."
"There needs to be more support for Mac operating systems."
"The configuration could be better by consolidating options and making it simpler."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"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."
"Error-handling features can be improved."
"If you are a developer or a more technical person, it's very difficult to learn the complete syntax or because CloudFormation includes a new way to write infrastructure code."
"GUI could be improved by adding graphical components."
"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."
"Including certain examples of templates would be advantageous."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"One area where AWS CloudFormation could improve is by offering more flexibility in creating custom templates."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while AWS Systems Manager is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 7 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.0. 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 Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Chef, whereas AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite, BigFix and Chef. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. AWS Systems Manager report.
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