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."In terms of technical support, you will get an immediate response."
"Maturity makes it a stable product."
"Compliance and the policies that can be set are the most valuable features."
"Its protection policies are most valuable. It protects mobile devices as well as individual apps. It is pretty scalable, and its documentation is also pretty good. It is also pretty straightforward to deploy."
"The solution is stable."
"It's very informative when there is an error. It allows us to backtrace where the error is and resolve that ourselves. It's a bit of a Swiss Army penknife. We find that it fixes most issues."
"Among the most valuable features are the Company Portal that is built into Intune, and the update rings so that we can manage what types of future updates the devices get."
"The solution is scalable. We currently have tens of thousands of users within our organization using the solution."
"The solution has helped with automation. I don't have to worry about provisioning machines and ensuring everything is set up. AWS CloudFormation takes care of the entire infrastructure for me."
"The most valuable feature of AWS CloudFormation is the simple tracking of infrastructure."
"There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides."
"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."
"Its ability to treat infrastructure's code is valuable. It makes things automatable and reproducible."
"Versioning makes our work easy."
"The most beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"The CloudFormation template can be reused to create multiple stacks, reducing duplications and improving our infrastructure."
"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."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"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."
"Chef is a great tool for an automation person who wants to do configuration management with infrastructure as a code."
"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."
"The scalability of the product is quite nice."
"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."
"The most important thing is it can handle a 100,000 servers at the same time easily with no time constraints."
"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."
"In terms of what can be improved, I am looking for better enhancements regarding Apple management, not only on the mobile device, but also on the laptop."
"It would help if administrators could pinpoint the exact location of a stolen device to help law enforcement retrieve it and apprehend the suspect."
"It would be nice to have a location tracker for the mobile device management tool. I'm not sure if it exists but hasn't been configured or if it's missing, but we've been unable to utilize the location features."
"Intune does not provide real-time visibility."
"The synchronization could be improved."
"There is no catalog for mobile access management (MAM) security."
"Lacking ability to leverage more iOS device management internally."
"The conditions that can be added in AWS CloudFormation are not as powerful as any programming language."
"If you are a developer or a more technical person, it's very difficult to learn the complete syntax or because CloudFormation includes a new way to write infrastructure code."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"Error-handling features can be improved."
"The speed of the replication process could improve. It can take some time to replicate that could use a speed increase."
"This tool is not intuitive and there are others that are easier to understand."
"There could be better error handling. It would be a good way to improve the solution."
"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."
"Vertical scalability is still good but the horizontal, adding more technologies, platforms, tools, integrations, Chef should take a look into that."
"I would rate this solution a nine because our use case and whatever we need is there. Ten out of ten is perfect. We have to go to IOD and stuff so they should consider things like this to make it a ten."
"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."
"The solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
"The AWS monitoring, AWS X-Ray, and some other features could be improved."
"Third-party innovations need improvement, and I would like to see more integration with other platforms."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"I would like to see more security features for Chef and more automation."
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 9th in Configuration Management with 20 reviews while Chef is ranked 15th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.2, 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 "Useful for large infrastructure, reliable, but steep learning cureve". AWS CloudFormation is most compared with AWS Systems Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Spring Cloud, Red Hat Satellite and SaltStack, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, AWS Systems Manager, Microsoft Configuration Manager and Nolio Release Automation. See our AWS CloudFormation vs. Chef report.
See our list of best Configuration Management vendors.
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