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."Agile and easy to deploy MDM solution that covers the maximum number of policies. Stable, scalable, and with knowledgeable technical support."
"The standout features of Intune are its excellent mobile device management and highly effective application management capabilities."
"As the solution is a software as a service, the scalability is unlimited."
"The ability to manage devices with different sets of policies is most valuable."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Intune provides full endpoint visibility and IT control across device platforms. You can individualize it for your company with the Intune Company Portal app."
"One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"A valuable feature is user enrollment, where users can enroll their devices in their organizations themselves."
"The CloudFormation template can be reused to create multiple stacks, reducing duplications and improving our infrastructure."
"Scripting does what we need to reinstall something from scratch."
"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."
"I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten. We use it every day."
"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."
"AWS CloudFormation has automated the resource-building process, thereby removing the scope of human errors. We can tag the resources which help the billing process."
"The most beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"AWS Cloud automation reduces the time needed to create AWS resources."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"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."
"Ansible provides great reliability when coupled with a versioning system (git). It helps providing predictability to the network by knowing exactly what's being pushed after validating it in production."
"Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is quite stable. If you set it up correctly with the right configurations and there are no hiccups during installation and deployment, it will be stable. I'd give stability a rating of eight out of ten."
"Ansible Tower provides a GUI, which is an enhancement, and a well-liked feature by operation teams."
"Having the Dashboard from an admin point of view, and seeing how all the projects and all the jobs lay out, is helpful."
"It is all modular-based. If there is not a module for it today, someone will write it."
"It does not require staff for deployment and maintenance. It just works."
"They can improve their MAM policies a little bit more and make them more granular. They should include more granular group policies. They are there, but they need to be more granular. Its stability should also be improved. It is not very stable. Sometimes, it shows some inconsistencies across tenants."
"The biggest problem we ever have is when something goes out of date after 30 days when nobody has logged into it. We do have a problem trying to get those back online. We've been working with Microsoft to resolve that problem, but that's been the only issue that we've had in the last few years."
"The most important thing is reporting. They should improve their reporting. They should give a free hand to users. In SCCM, I can create my own reports. For example, in SCCM, I can create an inventory report for my PC or for all PCs, but in Intune, we don't have an option to create any report. Microsoft claims that Intune is a successor of SCCM, but SCCM is more powerful than Intune. So, they should develop Intune more and make it equivalent to SCCM. Then, their product will be great in the market."
"There are a couple of issues with stability."
"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."
"I have a lot of Apple products in my environment. It would be nice to have an improved integration of Apple products with Microsoft Intune without Jam."
"The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
"I would like the ability to install the agent on devices from suppliers, which would enable us to implement a zero-trust strategy for guest devices."
"The speed of the replication process could improve. It can take some time to replicate that could use a speed increase."
"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."
"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."
"Including certain examples of templates would be advantageous."
"There could be better error handling. It would be a good way to improve the solution."
"As soon as they manage to parametrize the whole thing and to implement parameters at all levels, it will become automatically a lot more flexible."
"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."
"What could be improved in AWS CloudFormation is its user interface, in terms of graphical design, I prefer WYSIWYG."
"In Community, there's a lot of effort towards testing, standardizing, and testing for module development to role development, which is why Molecule is now becoming real. Same thing with Zuul, which we are starting to implement. Zulu tests out modules from third-party sources, like ourselves, and verifies that the modules work before they are committed to the code. Currently, Ansible can't do this with all the modules out there."
"It could be easier to integrate Ansible with other solutions. No single tool can do everything. For example, we use Terraform for infrastructure and other solutions for configuration management and VMs."
"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 governance features could be improved."
"Ansible is great, but there are not many modules. You can do about 80% to 90% of things by using commands, but more modules should be added. We cannot do some of the things in Ansible. In Red Hat, we have the YUM package manager, and there are certain options that we can pass through YUM. To install the Docker Community Edition, I'll write the yum install docker-ce command, but because the Docker Community Edition is not compatible with RHEL 8, I will have to use the nobest option, such as yum install docker-ce --nobest. The nobest option installs the most stable version that can be installed on a particular system. In Ansible, the nobest option is not there. So, it needs some improvements in terms of options. There should be more options, keywords, and modules."
"It would be good to make the solution more user-friendly,"
"The documentation for the installation step of deployment, OpenStack, etc., and these things have to be a bit more detailed."
"It needs better documentation."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 27 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 58 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.2, 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 "Capable of broad integrations with easy-to-operate infrastructure and user controls". 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.
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