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AWS CloudFormation vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AWS CloudFormation

    Score8.8 out of 10
    N/AAWS CloudFormation gives developers and systems administrators a way to create and manage a collection of related AWS resources, provisioning and updating them in a predictable fashion. Use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run an application. Users don’t need to figure out the order for provisioning AWS services or the subtleties of making those dependencies work.…

    $0

    Ansible

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AThe Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.

    $5,000

    per year

    Pricing
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Editions & Modules
    Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
    $0.00
    Handler Operation
    $0.0009
    per handler operation
    Basic Tower
    5,000
    per year
    Enterprise Tower
    10,000
    per year
    Premium Tower
    14,000
    per year
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Free Trial
    YesNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    YesNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsThere is no additional charge for using AWS CloudFormation with resource providers in the following namespaces: AWS::*, Alexa::*, and Custom::*. In this case you pay for AWS resources (such as Amazon EC2 instances, Elastic Load Balancing load balancers, etc.) created using AWS CloudFormation as if you created them manually. You only pay for what you use, as you use it; there are no minimum fees and no required upfront commitments. When you use resource providers with AWS CloudFormation outside the namespaces mentioned above, you incur charges per handler operation. Handler operations are create, update, delete, read, or list actions on a resource.—
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose AWS CloudFormation
    As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform …
    Incentivized
    Chose AWS CloudFormation
    The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform …
    Incentivized
    Red Hat
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    5 Answers
    99%
    Would buy again
    181 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    5 Answers
    97%
    Delivers good value for the price
    148 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    80%
    Happy with the feature set
    4 Answers
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    179 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    80%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    4 Answers
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    112 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    5 Answers
    91%
    Implementation went as expected
    140 Answers
    Features
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Configuration Management
    Comparison of Configuration Management features of AWS CloudFormation and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
    Feature
    AWS CloudFormation
    -
    Ratings
    Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform
    8.6
    44 Ratings
    7% above category average
    Infrastructure Automation00 Ratings9.244 Ratings
    Automated Provisioning00 Ratings8.841 Ratings
    Parallel Execution00 Ratings8.840 Ratings
    Node Management00 Ratings8.432 Ratings
    Reporting & Logging00 Ratings7.841 Ratings
    Version Control00 Ratings8.738 Ratings
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    Enterprises
    AWS Config
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    User Ratings
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.6
    (5 ratings)
    9.5
    (108 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (3 ratings)
    Usability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (3 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (5 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AWS CloudFormationAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    AWS CloudFormation is well suited for scenarios where all of your resources need to be provisioned on AWS but it is not suited for hybrid cloud deployments. It's very easy for someone new to learn. The level of customization offered as part of the template specifically for AWS services is great. There is also a UI tool where we can drag and drop the services we want and it generates an yaml file which is very easy to use. The visibility of stacks and its resources and one place where we can track and identify the issues in deployment is great.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    For automating the configuration of a multi-node, multi-domain (Storage, VM, Container) cluster, Ansible is still the best choice; however, it is not an easy task to achieve. Creating the infrastructure layer, i.e., creating network nodes, VMs, and K8s clusters, still can't be achieved via Ansible. Additionally, error handling remains complex to resolve.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • IaC, transactional on top of that
    • Support for "mainstream" general programming languages
    • Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly
    • OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
    • Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
    • Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • Error Description upon Failure Needs to be Improved.
    • Slow to create, delete or update.
    • Need to delete resources manually. It can ask before starting deletion whether to skip those resources or delete them.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • I can't think of any right now because I've heard about the Lightspeed and I'm really excited about that. Ansible has been really solid for us. We haven't had any issues. Maybe the upgrade process, but other than that, as coming from a user, it's awesome.
    • Give out Lightspeed for free.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    It's easy enough to get a shared template & apply it. You don't even have to download-then-upload or copy-and-paste, a publicly-accessible url works.
    Diving deeper, it has enough powerful capabilities to make the life of a platform / DevOps engineer bearable.
    However, you need equally deep knowledge to troubleshoot issues, when they inevitably pop up. This is the same for all IaC technologies, as they are additional abstraction layers on top of the native API provided by the cloud providers.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    I spoke on this topic today!
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information. Management guide.For information copy of the original. The new virtual Cloning virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information is configured with the same virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that were configured for the original virtual machine. For information about persistent memory and PMem storage, see the vSphere Resource Management Guide. For information
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • + We can standup a VPC in minutes
    • - It took a lot of inital time to set up
    • + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
    • NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
    • POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots

    AWS CloudFormation Screenshots

    Screenshot of CloudFormation - How it works overviewScreenshot of CloudFormation - High level how it worksScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template exampleScreenshot of CloudFormation - Template inputs overview