We performed a comparison between Cloudify and VMware Aria Automation based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Cloud Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Cloudify works in cases where you have very advanced service chaining requirements. It really works well there, and it fits the best. They have a standardized markup that's based on TOSCA, which is a standard. I like the fact that they're standards-based. Their solution works extremely well if you have the talent and the manpower to write TOSCA descriptors to deploy and interchange services or to automate the configuration and turn up of services."
"Extensible internal functions and plugins. Can implement custom plugins to fit your scenario. Python based plugins."
"Product has given us the ability to catch early scaling issues that many companies hit on with private clouds."
"The solution includes the option to run background scripts and processes from a connected API."
"It enables a single platform to communicate with the entire infrastructure."
"TOSCA model allows modeling the application rather than the automation. It is a machine-readable representation of the application and its infrastructure, which can be used for other things too, not just for the orchestration (e.g. enterprise architecture big picture, who connects to whom)."
"Has great extendability which means you can build your own custom logic."
"You can use only what you need. You can remove certain Cloudify functions from the framework to create a "minified" version of what you need. This might only consist of the messaging delivery system, and the orchestration functions."
"The most valuable feature that we have is that it's able to deploy several different operating systems, it's able to deploy whatever we want. We can take a template, spin it up, revise it, save it back off, and be able to have that for other departments. We can have one for our Dev team and one for our research team which has some specific requirements. We can keep track of them and deploy things automatically."
"vRealize automation stability is pretty good. They are always fixing bugs. The product team is doing a great job of addressing any issues that we might have."
"It has integration with the rest of VMware solutions."
"One of the most valuable features is lifecycle management. It allows my teams to create, manage, and retire all of our infrastructure objects in the data center."
"Today, if I want to provision one VM, it takes me five minutes. Earlier, it would take a minimum of 30 minutes to go and choose everything. Now, I can just do one click and it can provision my whole VM. We also integrated with our Alexa, so even through voice functionality, I can create a VM. One of the guys at VMware, along with our partner, deployed that in our environment. If I say, "Hey, Alexa, I need a VM with four gigs of RAM," it will go and start creating it."
"The preset policies and templates are useful. I would say that vRA is one of the best solutions we have. The CI/CD features also look helpful even though we aren't using them at the moment. We plan to get more involved and train our customers as much as possible."
"The feature of automated balancing which implemented between two data centers solely for the purpose of a recovery plan is valuable."
"We have integrated our CICD pipeline into an automatic catalog request through some API calls. It can request and provision new virtual machines behind the NSX load balancer, straight out of the CIDC pipeline and add those nodes to the load balancer, request SSL certs, do SSL termination at the load balancer so that it's not encrypted behind the scenes, all of which has really been helpful."
"It lacked the user interface for multitenancy and basic platform management tasks. It is a leader in the niche area that they like to perform in, but it only does about 30% of top-tier advanced functions of platform management. It doesn't meet about 70% of what you need to manage a private cloud platform."
"Install of the product itself could be improved and I would like to see better event monitoring."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"Unlike the Docker environment, Cloudify takes time for configuration and its learning curve."
"Error handling could be improved; GUI is lacking with respect to user privileges and connectivity."
"Certainly the UI could use some intensive work, but nevertheless, overall, it’s a complete product with its 3.4 version and much better features are available with 4.0."
"The solution is a bit of a headache because mistakes happen in the blueprint every time we deploy and they require modifications."
"Something as simple as formatting the catalog in a different way would be helpful because there is no option for doing so. A lot of the contents for the virtual machine, blueprints that you can request, are hidden from view and there's no way to change the view."
"I don't find the solution to be intuitive and user- friendly. The GUI is really complicated. Tracking down logs and errors is very hard. Then, it takes a specialized JavaScript person to build. Also, I'm not sure how the upgrades are going now, but they definitely need to evolve the upgrade process. Finally, the logs are very generalized. Giving more of an indicator of what's actually going wrong, rather than just a generic error code, would help."
"The initial setup was complex because we have a high availability cluster. Especially when it comes to upgrades, we have a lot of downtimes and problems. The upgrade experience has been painful."
"I would also like to see them streamline the install. It's split between Windows and Linux appliances, and it would be easier if it was all appliances. I think they're going that way."
"VMware should go the way of vROps, with everything in one machine, the ability to scale out, and a more distributed environment instead of having the usual centralized SQL database."
"vRealize Automation on the back-end is still a little complicated. It has a lot of moving pieces, simplifying that from a pure infrastructure point of view would be a good thing. I would then like to have more out-of-the-box functionality and integrations with VMware components."
"When it comes to the orchestration workflow, you're on your own. The documentation and resources are very limited, and you have to learn everything on your own."
"I would like to see support for Google Cloud and Azure. Because they don't support Google and Azure today, we need something that's cohesive with our entire landscape. There is a gap right now with VMware. If you want support for these environments, you have to go elsewhere right now."
Cloudify is ranked 20th in Cloud Management with 12 reviews while VMware Aria Automation is ranked 1st in Cloud Management with 133 reviews. Cloudify is rated 8.0, while VMware Aria Automation is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Cloudify writes "Works very well for advanced service chaining requirements and has extremely advanced engineers for support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware Aria Automation writes "Allows for a lot of orchestration or customization within our environment to suit our customers". Cloudify is most compared with Morpheus, CloudStack, OpenNebula, Nutanix Cloud Manager (NCM) and Scalr, whereas VMware Aria Automation is most compared with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, VMware Aria Operations, vCloud Director, Morpheus and vCenter Orchestrator. See our Cloudify vs. VMware Aria Automation report.
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