Amazon CloudFront vs. Microsoft System Center Operations Manager (SCOM)

Amazon CloudFront is the perfect solution for any type of company. If a company is small or medium size, CloudFront offers 1 TB monthly free bandwidth which is more than for any small and medium size companies. If we compare the speed of CloudFront with other CDN, CloudFront is way ahead of their competitors and with 1 TB free bandwidth. If someone is ready to invest time in CloudFront documentation then he/she definitely go for it.

Incentivized

More appropriate for:

• Pure Microsoft ecosystem environments (Windows Server and SQL server) and the most common Linux and UNIX platforms.
• Environments where cost is less of a factor than settling on a single platform for monitoring
• Environments where the administrators are familiar with the setup and installation of SCOM.

Less appropriate for:

• Pure UNIX/Linux shops, especially versions not supported out of the box by SCOM.
• Shops that cannot afford the engagement to setup/configure and maintain on a continuous basis.
• Shops that cannot dedicate personnel to the care and feeding of SCOM, especially when supporting larger environments.

Incentivized

• if a website’s static data are based in New York City, people in Boston will get the content faster than people in San Francisco or Tokyo. The farther away customers are from a company’s data center, the slower the website or application loads. This problem can be fixed with a content delivery network like Amazon CloudFront
• When a visitor requests a file from your website, Amazon CloudFront automatically sends the request to a copy of the file at the nearest edge location. This results in faster download times.
• You may have great hosting but it doesn’t have the capacity or scalability offered by Google, Microsoft or Yahoo. The better CDNs like Amazon CloudFront offer higher availability, lower network latency and lower packet loss.
• Amazon CloudFront provides 24/7 email and phone support
• Amazon CloudFront Free Tier allows you to free up to 50 GB of data transfer and 2,000,000 HTTP and HTTPS requests / month for one year.

Incentivized

• Allows us to visualize our systems in a single interface and see the status of health as well as relevant performance metrics.
• A flexible and powerful interface with active alerting covering domain controllers, SQL servers, etc...
• Allows you to customize your views and workspaces for specific tasks and needs.
• Reporting is powerful and flexible.

Incentivized

• Kinda of costlier when compared to rivals providing the same service
• The setup of Distribution is kinda little complicated, need good exposure before setting up the service
• Sometimes we can go with S3 Delivery service rather than Cloudfront if the website is providing static content and its way cheaper

Incentivized

• One of the biggest drawbacks to SCOM is the sheer scope and complexity of the system. This can be a pro and a con. The system is very customizable, what you put into it is what you'll get out of it. That said, the learning curve is fairly steep. An organization needs to be committed to putting time and resources into SCOM to get the most out of it. I've heard stories from colleagues of several different companies that invested in SCOM and then abandoned it due to the excessive time and care required.
• SCOM is expensive. Not only is the enterprise licensing costly, SCOM requires it's own servers, operational and warehouse databases to be maintained.
• The OOB SCOM reports are a bit clunky and feel outdated.

Incentivized

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is tightly integrated to Microsoft Windows servers os monitoring with great product support.

Incentivized

Easy way to integrate a CDN within the AWS infrastructure. It allows further customization based on company needs.

Incentivized

Ease of Use and user friendly dashboard

Incentivized

CloudFront is a good CDN solution. It can be a bit complicated to implement depending on your needs, but AWS tech support is great. You get to avoid a ton of upfront costs by going with CloudFront. It works best in conjunction with other AWS services in your infrastructure. Once you set it up, you won't need to do much to maintain it. It just works.

Incentivized

Hard to get support. The product is not being actively developed anymore, so it is hard to get new features for the product.

Incentivized

Easy to install with intuitive interactive interface during the installation process a and integration to MS SQL was smooth

Incentivized

Amazon has always been creative and leading, and I have been using its services for years. They are very reassuring and have fast and responsive support--you can call them from any time zone to respond quickly. High security on servers, open hands on changes, and increasing and decreasing server resources and features.

We used Altiris and WSUS and in the beginning Altiris had the better admin interface than SCOM, but it is no longer the case as SCOM has refined their admin interface. Altiris still has better and more robust group assignments for management roles and those two other tools can better manage non Windows OS devices than SCOM but for a large enterprise Windows shop, if you can afford it, SCOM is the way to go.

Incentivized

• RoI for using CloudFront is immense. You can use it for all your certificate management and static asset management of your websites using CloudFront.
• It is as good or better than any other CDN provider with multi-region support across the world using AWS regions.

Incentivized

• It has allowed us to provide an Enterprise Event/Alert management solution to the Global company
• It has taken a long time to get it to provide valuable alerts and information, lots of user resources and investment.
• It assists with 24/7 monitoring and out of hours support

Incentivized