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."We are a remote company, and the product helps us manage the global endpoints. It helps us natively manage the endpoints in the cloud from anywhere."
"The solution is easy to use and it has good performance."
"Easy to use."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"The security-related tools are excellent; these features allow us to secure devices, lock them down, and ensure compliance."
"It's easy to manage."
"It's easy to manage and easy to configure."
"I would say the biggest benefit is the single-pane view. There's no jumping around multiple UI's to do your overall management."
"Versioning makes our work easy."
"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."
"The reusability of the solution is valuable."
"There is a cost-benefit to using CloudFormation that comes about because of the automation that it provides."
"The nested stacks would be one of the more valuable features."
"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."
"Scripting does what we need to reinstall something from scratch."
"Automations make it pretty easy to provision AWS, development, or deployment environments."
"Ansible Tower offers use a UI where we can see all the pushes that have gone into the server."
"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."
"It increases our company's efficiency, automating all the simple tasks which used to take hours of somebody's time."
"It was easy to read and learn. It is a YAML-based syntax, which makes it easily understand and pick up."
"The initial setup is easy and takes a few hours to complete."
"Ansible Galaxy is helpful for roles and Git Submodules: No dependency in managing playbooks. Also, fact caching in redis for host/role grp information speeds up execution. Finally, variable management is easy."
"There are no agents by default, so adding a new server is a matter of a couple lines of configuration (on a new server and the configuration master)."
"The reason I like Ansible is, first, the coding of it is very straightforward, it's very human-readable. I'm also on a contract, and I can clearly iterate and bring people up to speed very quickly on writing a Playbook compared with writing up a Puppet manifest or a Salt script."
"The solution can have some compliance problems in general and the end-point user can bypass easily the company policies in Intune."
"The product needs to upgrade itself when the server is overloaded."
"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."
"Microsoft Intune needs to improve the initial login process."
"There are a few security features that are not available in Microsoft Intune, when compared to other products."
"It needs incorporation of Knox, ZeroTouch, etc."
"There should be more focus on mobile device security and integration."
"Reporting and troubleshooting for the application deployment could be better. It's very difficult to understand."
"Including certain examples of templates would be advantageous."
"The solution must enable more hands-on designing of the templates."
"The speed of the replication process could improve. It can take some time to replicate that could use a speed increase."
"There is less support for on-premise environments."
"GUI could be improved by adding graphical components."
"They could improve the product's capability to handle circular dependencies more effectively."
"The product should be made cloud-agnostic, allowing users to deploy the same environment with minimal tweaks across different cloud platforms, similar to Terraform. Additionally, it would be beneficial to have the ability to manage templates outside of the AWS environment."
"The solution needs to offer better support to other cloud vendors."
"It should support more integration with different products."
"There are some options not available in the community edition of the solution."
"The solution should add a nice self-service portal."
"For a couple of the API integrations, there has been a lack of documentation."
"Ansible could use more public relations and marketing."
"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."
"What I would like to see is a refined Dashboard to see, when I log in: Here are all my jobs, here are how many times they've executed; some kind graphical stitching-together of the workflows and jobs, and how they're connected. Also, those "failed hosts," what does that mean? We have a problem, a failed host can be anything. Is SSH the reason it failed? Is the job template why it failed? It doesn't really distinguish that."
"Improvements should be made in terms of execution speed, which is, I believe, the most lacking feature. Aside from that, re-triggering a failed task is another useful feature."
More Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Pricing and Cost Advice →
AWS CloudFormation is ranked 9th in Configuration Management with 25 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, Chef 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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