AWS CloudFormation vs. Sparx Systems Enterprise Architect

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

Enterprise Architect can be used to capture business requirements, design and management of all successive models, algorithms, process flows/workflows, design of business data objects and other artifacts. The strong point is the ability to link the items in all models with each other, the more time the analysts and designers "invest" into making nice and clearly defined models, the higher the future pay-off by any successive changes to the systems. Enterprise Architect is not a good tool for capturing rather unstructured business requirements, use e.g. Confluence or other solutions instead. EA should comprise the extracted models with very little unstructured information. Management of the changes process should not be done in Enterprise Architect, rather use JIRA/Confluence or similar.

Incentivized

• SaaS
• Paas
• Iaas
• On promises

Incentivized

• Open Architecture - A wide and extensive set of options, plug-ins and customization options make Sparx EA more of a tool kit than just a tool. Most tools allow customization but Sparx EA is built from the ground up with this in mind.
• Wide variety of formats, lexicons, standards and data import export capabilities allow different roles to interact with the information in different ways.
• Automated report generation allows architects and designers to spend less taking on word processing and more time on performing architecture and design.

Incentivized

• 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

• Needs someone that is very conversant with business modelling terminology

Incentivized

The support team of Sparx EA, based in Australia, is always willing to help and give direction.

Incentivized

We didn't look into anything else as Cloudformation was "built-in" for AWS, it just kind of made sense to go with that. Terraform was something that we briefly looked into Terraform but decides to stick with Cloudformation because our task was relatively "simple". Apparently if it's a bit more complex, Terraform might be the way to go.

Incentivized

BiZZdesign represents a different new concept to enterprise architecture, its gravity center is not technical modelling, but rather a view on capturing the whole end-user experience or customer journey. It also allows to grasp areas as internal company capabilities, required for adoption/changes and operation of the solution, uses the same Archimate modelling language. This solution is in my opinion a new generation enabling to not only design the solutions, but also manage the whole application portfolio with respect to capabilities and requirement parameters.

Incentivized

• It has a positive ROI
• Less time inverted in bugs
• More stable source code

Incentivized

• This program speed up the development process. It generates the actual code with my model classes after modeling

Incentivized