We performed a comparison between AWS CloudFormation 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."The Autopilot feature is fantastic. It is a Microsoft product, so it deals best with Microsoft operating systems, but it can integrate with iOS, Mac OS, Linux, and Android."
"The solution is easy to use."
"There has been a noticeable increase in productivity for both my organization and clients."
"Conditional access helps me control uncontrolled access."
"The main advantage is that Intune performs its intended functions effectively."
"Configuration profiles, remediation, scripts, and auto-pilot features are very good."
"One of the main features of the solution is it allows the management of many devices in different ways."
"Users can make screenshots, and devices only need the minimal version of iOS."
"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 nested stacks would be one of the more valuable features."
"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."
"CloudFormation gives us control of AWS and any Cloud infrastructure. It creates the whole stack for Cloud services technologies so it's easy to manage the whole system."
"Since AWS CloudFormation integrates well with the AWS platform, it facilitates faster deployment. Building templates for AWS services within the solution is also straightforward, making the process easier."
"There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides."
"AWS Cloud automation reduces the time needed to create AWS resources."
"The most beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"It streamlined our deployments and system configurations across the board rather than have us use multiple configurations or tools, basically a one stop shop."
"We have had less production issues since using Chef to automate our provisioning."
"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 important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"If you're handy enough with DSL and you can present your own front-facing interface to your developers, then you can actually have a lot more granular control with Chef in operations over what developers can perform and what they can't."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"I'd like some more reporting so that I don't have to delve into PowerShell and I can pull more of the local device information such as memory, apps installed, etc. It would be nice to be able to see the apps that are present there but might not be managed. For example, if they installed 7Zip, it could report that back via an installed program or feature to see what was currently installed."
"No option to do end-to-en macOS management. Slow implementation of policies."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"One big problem with Microsoft is that they're changing the names of the products quite often, or they're quite consistently doing so. Intune is now Endpoint administration. Constantly switching the user interface or the administrative interface makes it quite hard to keep pace. If you are on a two-week holiday and you come back and look at the same screen you have looked at for the last couple of months, it looks different, which is annoying. Changing things around all the time doesn't make it easy."
"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."
"Lacking ability to leverage more iOS device management internally."
"Cost is the biggest factor for us right now. Microsoft Intune and AD P1 together in a bundle is a good thing to have, but it is very costly compared to other products in the market. Otherwise, Microsoft Intune is the best."
"Creating the inline policies is not great."
"If Amazon could extend CloudFormation to other cloud platforms, that would be good. Currently, it is only limited to AWS."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"There is less support for on-premise environments."
"Provisioning a large environment or a large number of services takes a bit more time than with Terraform."
"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."
"The solution must enable more hands-on designing of the templates."
"What could be improved in AWS CloudFormation is its user interface, in terms of graphical design, I prefer WYSIWYG."
"Support and pricing for Chef could be improved."
"They could provide more features, so the recipes could be developed in a simpler and faster way. There is still a lot of room for improvement, providing better functionalities when creating recipes."
"The agent on the server sometimes acts finicky."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
"I would also like to see more analytics and reporting features. Currently, the analytics and reporting features are limited. I'll have to start building my own custom solution with Power BI or Tableau or something like that. If it came with built-in analytics and reporting features that would be great."
"There appears to be no effort to fix the command line utility functionality, which is definitely broken, provides a false positive for a result when you perform the operation, and doesn't work."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, while Chef 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 Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Microsoft Configuration Manager, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix and SaltStack. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. Chef report.
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