We performed a comparison between AWS Systems Manager 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."Intune's unified endpoint management platform is invaluable."
"The stability of Microsoft Intune is good."
"I like that we can implement conditional access."
"The key benefit of Intune is its integration with the Microsoft ecosystem."
"Application deployment and keeping the devices secure no matter where they are, by having this cloud solution — that has been great."
"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."
"I can see that the patch management process is much improved with the bundled patch management option available in Microsoft Intune compared to the KPI deployment required by the other deployment solutions."
"...Intune itself integrates with that entire Microsoft ecosystem. As an individual product itself, it's okay. It holds up. But when you start saying "I've bought this as part of a wider solution, as a company we are going Microsoft throughout," then it makes more sense to have Microsoft Intune... so you have that single dashboard."
"Has a variety of automation options."
"AWS provides Auto Scaling groups."
"When we do the automation in the cloud, we use the SSM agent. This helps us to test our automation and documents, and monitor the cloud."
"Systems Manager has a feature where it analyzes the logs and gives us a performance overview in the form of a graph. We know when it's taking up more resources and when there are spikes, so we can predict the usability."
"The solution is user-friendly"
"The solution's ability to scale is good."
"With AWS Systems Manager, our company can patch our systems directly from it, so we don't need to patch our systems manually."
"The product is useful for automating processes."
"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."
"Chef recipes are easy to write and move across different servers and environments."
"The most valuable feature is the language that it uses: Ruby."
"Chef can be scaled as needed. The Chef server itself can scale but it depends on the available resources. You can upgrade specific resources to meet the demand. Similarly, with clients, you can add as many clients as you need. Again, this depends on the server resources. If the server has enough resources, it can handle the number of servers required to manage the infrastructure. Chef can be scaled to meet the needs of the infrastructure being managed."
"The most valuable feature is its easy configuration management, optimization abilities, complete infrastructure and application automation, and its superiority over other similar tools."
"It is a well thought out product which integrates well with what developers and customers are looking for."
"Deployment has become quick and orchestration is now easy."
"It would be great to see on-premises mailboxes and for the solution to have geofencing capabilities."
"Intune's third-party patch management could be better. It should be easier for the average system admin to keep non-Microsoft applications updated."
"It should be simplified. I've worked with many different mobile device management solutions, and Intune is one of the more complex ones. It could be more simplified, and some of it is related to the wording that is being used, such as a configuration profile versus a policy. They really should have had different names to make it less confusing."
"Lacking in features such as Wi-Fi and network security."
"More integration with monitoring tools is needed."
"The scalability could be improved, and like most other MDM products, Intune is good but not 100% there yet."
"We need the capabilities of the Cloud Management Gateway (CMG) to be enhanced through Intune instead of Azure."
"The solution could improve its flexibility."
"We formerly used third-party products to analyze the log, give us information, and find bottlenecks. Systems Manager could provide more tools that conduct this analysis, so we don't have to do it ourselves."
"Additional features can be added as per customer requirements."
"Lacks sufficient integrations."
"AWS does not have EKS cluster backup."
"The AWS UIs are not the most intuitive. Also, the usability needs room for improvement."
"The current challenge is that we can't pull any incidents from other accounts."
"The fact that AWS Systems Manager takes time to complete the patching process, makes it an area where improvements are required."
"It is an old technology."
"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."
"If they can improve their software to support Docker containers, it would be for the best."
"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."
"The time that it takes in terms of integration. Cloud integration is comparatively easy, but when it comes to two-link based integrations - like trying to integrate it with any monitoring tools, or maybe some other ticketing tools - it takes longer. That is because most of the out-of-the-box integration of the APIs needs some revisiting."
"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 solution could improve in managing role-based access. This would be helpful."
AWS Systems Manager is ranked 6th in Configuration Management with 7 reviews while Chef is ranked 16th in Configuration Management with 18 reviews. AWS Systems Manager is rated 8.0, while Chef is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of AWS Systems Manager writes "Offers a variety of automation options; simplifies governance and administration ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Chef writes "Easy configuration management, optimization abilities, and complete infrastructure and application automation". AWS Systems Manager is most compared with Microsoft Configuration Manager, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Red Hat Satellite, AWS CloudFormation and SaltStack, whereas Chef is most compared with Jenkins, Microsoft Azure DevOps, BigFix, SaltStack and Microsoft Configuration Manager. See our AWS Systems Manager vs. Chef report.
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