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."The mobile application management, MAM, is the most useful aspect of the solution."
"Internet-based access with security is what I have found to be most valuable. It is also a stable and scalable solution."
"Remote Wipe and Autopilot is one of the best features."
"While I don't think you can ever have full visibility and control, Intune certainly allows us to see the applications being used and tells us if things like Windows patches aren't applied to machines. It does a good job. That visibility makes life a little easier."
"Being able to manage the devices remotely is most valuable. We can push security requirements through Microsoft Intune."
"I like that we can implement conditional access."
"The most valuable feature is the UEM capabilities."
"Maturity makes it a stable product."
"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."
"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 reusability of the solution is valuable."
"The nested stacks would be one of the more valuable features."
"The most valuable feature of AWS CloudFormation is the simple tracking of infrastructure."
"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."
"Managing our inventory is a big pain point. Right now, we have Satellite, but we can tie it in with Satellite, so we can actually manage things and automate the entire deployment stack, instead of trying to grab things from tickets, then generating Kickstart, and using that to get things in Satellite. That doesn't work well. We can do the whole deployment stack using the inventory share between Tower and Satellite."
"The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"Installing it is a PIP command. So, it's pretty easy. It is a one liner."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"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."
"The most valuable features of the solution are automation and patching."
"Since it is in YAML, if I have to explain it to somebody else, they can easily understand it."
"I like being able to control multiple systems and push out updates quickly with just a couple of clicks of a button and commands. I like the automation because it is a time saver."
"It would be good if, in addition to the minimal patching and compliance, we could also use Intune for application deployment. For instance, if a device is not patched, Intune should have the ability to push not only a Microsoft patch but also other patches, such as a browser patch."
"We haven't really gone through all the features of Intune. We are just discovering them. Every day, we see a new feature that we want to apply, but what will be great for Intune is to be able to deploy apps in a simple fashion. We should be able to easily install various apps on the Windows platform, iOS, and Android. Currently, we have to write some scripts. It's not as straightforward as we would like it to be. It should be simplified so that we can do it just with three clicks—next, next, finish—without needing to write a script."
"I know that their AI pieces are at the infancy stage, but allowing users to do more tagging for information would be an interesting thing because Intune also directly integrates with Azure. Because a lot of the devices are hosted with that, you also get a lot of tagging of user data and other things like that."
"Microsoft Intune lags market leaders, such as Apperian, in its MAM capabilities."
"Technical support is not that great."
"I would like to see easier pushdowns. Currently, we have to package our own software and then push it. Intune can make that way easier and integrate applications, such as Zoom and Adobe Acrobat, that are used by a lot of enterprise or corporate organizations."
"Intune could add more Linux security features and more integration with on-prem devices. The application deployments can also be improved."
"For an existing customer who has an SCCM, it would need to be upgraded to an MECM first before I can introduce Microsoft Intune."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"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."
"It would help all users if AWS improved the auto-generation of the CloudFormation file."
"For a beginner, it's kind of difficult to set up. So, the user does need some knowledge in order to do it."
"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."
"They could improve the product's capability to handle circular dependencies more effectively."
"Provisioning a large environment or a large number of services takes a bit more time than with Terraform."
"Error-handling features can be improved."
"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."
"The job workflow needs to be worked on. It's not really clear to how you actually link things together. What they probably could do is provide an example workflow on how to stitch things together. I think that would be very helpful."
"Ansible has just been upgraded, and the only issue that we are seeing at the moment is that the user interface can be slow. We're currently investigating the refresh period with Red Hat when you click a job and run a job. It seems that the buffer no longer runs in real-time. We haven't discovered whether that's partially an issue with our environment, but Red Hat has come back and said that they're working on a couple of bugs in the background. We've upgraded to that version in the last six months, and that's the only issue that we've seen."
"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."
"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."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
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AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 62 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 "Makes it easy to build playbooks and saves time and resources". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite and Microsoft Configuration Manager, 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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