We performed a comparison between AWS Systems Manager and Chef 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."Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"I like the group policy management feature, which performs application monitoring and device enrollment."
"A great solution for anyone wanting a modern endpoint device management solution."
"Stable solution at a good price."
"One of the standout features of Intune is its seamless accessibility to work data, eliminating the need to be tied to an office or a desktop."
"If you need only to load a specific profile and you don't have deep security functionalities, et cetera, Intune is very nice and good."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"Intune device restriction policies enable me to enforce limitations on the device, like blocking the mobile camera or restricting the employees from using and inserting USB devices, including thumb drives and flash drives."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"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."
"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."
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"The most valuable feature is automation."
"One thing that we've been able to do is a tiered permission model, allowing developers and their managers to perform their own operations in lower environments. This means a manager can go in and make changes to a whole environment, whereas a developer with less access may only be able to change individual components or be able to upgrade the version for software that they have control over."
"Manual deployments came to a halt completely. Server provisioning became lightning fast. Chef-docker enabled us to have fewer sets of source code for different purposes. Configuration management was a breeze and all the servers were as good as immutable servers."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"It has been very easy to tie it into our build and deploy automation for production release work, etc. All the Chef pieces more or less run themselves."
"This solution has improved my organization in the way that deployment has become very quick and orchestration is easy. If we have thousands of servers we can easily deploy in a small amount of time. We can deploy the applications or any kind of announcements in much less time."
"It should be easier to define policies and comply with those policies."
"Intune's reporting and logging could be improved. When troubleshooting, it's difficult to collect the logs and determine what's happening. If I want to filter out the compliant devices, I can see it from the logs, but I would like the option to drill down further."
"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."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"Integration with Mac devices requires some improvement."
"The difficulty of the the roll out is surprisingly difficult considering this product is supposed to be an integrated part of the 365 suite."
"There are a few security features that are not available in Microsoft Intune, when compared to other products."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"Since we are heading to IoT, this product should consider anything related to this."
"If only Chef were easier to use and code, it would be used much more widely by the community."
"I would like them to add database specific items, configuration items, and migration tools. Not necessarily on the builder side or the actual setup of the system, but more of a migration package for your different database sets, such as MongoDB, your extenders, etc. I want to see how that would function with a transition out to AWS for Aurora services and any of the RDBMS packages."
"Chef could get better by being more widely available, adapting to different needs, and providing better documentation."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"There is a slight barrier to entry if you are used to using Ansible, since it is Ruby-based."
AWS Systems Manager is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 7 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.0, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite, AWS CloudFormation and SaltStack, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix, SaltStack and Microsoft Configuration Manager. See our AWS Systems Manager vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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