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."There is a single pane of glass for user access and a single sign-on facility for the user. If you have already logged in to Microsoft Azure or on-premises, you can redirect directly to Microsoft Endpoint Manager, monitor all your security threats, and analyze the data associated with the application in a single, unified way."
"The biggest benefits of Intune are the ability to push changes and the added security. When we moved forward with Defender, we onboarded all those machines automatically. That helps dramatically. For a while, we were left with machines that weren't protected. We could see where people had done things they shouldn't have done, and Defender saved our skins a few times. It didn't happen a lot, but it happened enough that it made us glad we made that decision."
"It is a stable solution."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"If you need only to load a specific profile and you don't have deep security functionalities, et cetera, Intune is very nice and good."
"The aspects I find most valuable are the managing the data and applications. I can also restrict the users to install any applications. I can also wipe the data if the phone was missplaced or stolen. These are the basics for me."
"I can reach devices or computers over the internet. I don't need to worry about the network connectivity between the offices. I can manage any device. That is the most important part."
"Fortunately, now everything is streamlined into a single, unified platform."
"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."
"What I like best about AWS CloudFormation is that it is a quick and simple way to deploy various applications, like WordPress."
"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."
"It allows defining the infrastructure as code using templates, which describe the desired state of the infrastructure."
"It is easy to work from the console and deploy new database services."
"Versioning makes our work easy."
"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 beneficial aspect lies in its capability to handle input acquisition and assessment."
"The solution is very simple to use."
"The solution is capable of integrating with many applications and devices in comparison to BigFix."
"On the network side, I already have a lot of our firewall related processes automated. If it's not automated all the way from the ticket system, our network team members, our tier-one guys in India, can just go into the Tower web interface and fill in a couple of survey questions."
"I like the agentless feature. This means we don't install any agent in worker nodes."
"Some colleagues and other companies use it and comment that it is easy to use, easy to understand, and offers good features."
"The playbooks and the code the solution uses are quite useful."
"Role-based access control and agentless architecture are the main features which may attract users."
"The user interface is well-built and very easy to navigate around."
"The UI also needs improvements because it is complex for end-users. We have had feedback from a few users in our organization who found the UI is not feasible for tracking and analyzing all the processes and monitoring all the devices."
"What would make this product better is adding more security policies and features in the next upgrade."
"The current Intune reporting functionality could benefit from some improvements."
"There can be delays in the deployment of new policies."
"It needs certificate provisioning for S/MIME purposes."
"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."
"Data leak prevention can be integrated into it. Currently, it does not have data leak prevention."
"The Mac integration has room for improvement."
"Error-handling features can be improved."
"Creating the inline policies is not great."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"Including certain examples of templates would be advantageous."
"The speed of the replication process could improve. It can take some time to replicate that could use a speed increase."
"There needs to be improvement in the orchestration."
"The tool should allow us to create infrastructure. It has everything when it comes to management, but it lacks the provisioning aspect."
"What we need is model-driven, declarative software infrastructure management. However, things tend to break with new versions, requiring a lot of work to fix…The focus should be on improving the support for Ansible in the area of AI coding."
"The support could be better."
"There have been some differences between the operating systems that we have noticed. It could be down to cryptographic policies, but we have noticed some speed issues. They should work on the speed of deployment on different operating systems."
"When you set up Playbooks, I may have one version of the Playbook, but another member of the team may have a different vision, and we will not know which version is correct. We want to have one central repository for managing the different versions of Playbooks, so we can have better collaboration among team members. This is our use case for using Git version control."
"It can use some more credential types. I've found that when I go looking for a certain credential type, such as private keys, they're not really 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."
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AWS CloudFormation is ranked 8th in Configuration Management with 28 reviews while Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is ranked 1st in Configuration Management with 60 reviews. AWS CloudFormation is rated 8.4, 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 "Its agentless, making the deployment fast and easy". 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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