Apache CloudStack vs. AWS Config

CloudStack is well suited if you want to keep the costs low and still need a reliable and robust tool to cloud virtualization orchestration. The end user interface is friendly so users can find and use functionalities quickly. Also, the newer version allows you to integrate CloudStack with external authentication using SAML for single sign-on. It can be less appropriate for an administrator that does not want to do a lot of interventions using a command line or that does not use the Linux operating system.

Incentivized

To keep track of changes and to answer many compliance issues this is a life-saver. AWS does a good job providing tools like this. Any AWS workload should be monitored with AWS Config. It even is great for troubleshooting and seeing who changed what at what time.

Incentivized

• New functionalities
• Fixing bugs
• Private and public clouds

• It can help you define rules for provisioning and configuring of your AWS. We use it for this purpose.
• It maintains configuration history. So you can use the AWS Management Console, API, or CLI to obtain details of past configurations
• It gives you a configuration snapshot of all of your AWS resources and you can store it in AWS S3.
• You can integrate it with AWS CloudTrail to correlate configuration changes to particular events in your account.

Incentivized

• Maintenance tools
• Less command line interventions
• Server logs not so friendly
• Upgrades are not so straightforward
• The graphical interface performance in big environments can get a little bit slow

Incentivized

• Vendor lock-in, no easy migration path for example if you want to move some workloads to Azure, you'd not be able to lift and shift.
• Only at an AWS resource perspective - cannot do desired state configuration at an OS level (which makes sense but be good if you could even as a separate feature within AWS Config).

Incentivized

The performance has never been an issue for us, the dashboard gives us real-time monitoring and the alert sends us the notification within less than a minute of it happening, this applies to all of the monitored resources on AWS. However we can't (or probably haven't figured out how to) integrate with any other third party services, so we can't really evaluate how it integrates with other services

Incentivized

The University, my first large implementation, had a big issue with 149 small data centers spread on São Paulo State, this data centers costs to university were very high, the consolidation idea in two data centers were awesome, but were worried with the management, so we adopted ACS to management of all 576 physical hosts. Now a days the university is delivering IaaS for all staff, students, teachers and researchers, they are using these resources to delivery services to their clients and have a great results in research area

Despite the comparison it is not really apples to apples, the main purpose of the service is quite similar which is to monitor your application or services. In terms of AWS services, AWS Config provides more options to monitor and log your service on the infrastructure level which is very useful on that level and overall will give you more information about what is currently happening. Meanwhile PaperTrail is more suited to monitor and log your service and could only give you information on the application level.

Incentivized

• Minimal impact at migration from the earlier solution used (Citrix CloudPortal), once both solutions have a common kernel.
• Reduction to 0 with payment of software license.

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized