Aptible vs. CloudFoundry vs. Splunk On-Call

I would recommend Aptible Deploy to my colleagues because of its responsiveness and efficiency for environment and application provisioning. The product is extremely useful for creating health applications due to its built-in security and compliance protocols for HIPAA and HITRUST. The automated database backups were also a nice touch for failover scenarios, as is the included horizontal scaling. The horizontal scaling automatically defaults toward high availability as well.

Incentivized

It's well suited if:

• The organization has large number of applications that needs to be deployed frequently.
• The organization is tied to the DevOps mindset.
• The organization has programs in different languages.
• The applications does not need EJB's support that servers like web logic provide.

It's less suited if:

• The applications needs security configuration within the same CloudFoundry instance.
• The organization, for whatever reason does not want developers to manage the instances.

Incentivized

I recommend Splunk on-call is more suited where there are high incident queues; multiple teams need to be involved in handling a P1 severity issue. Multiple levels of escalation are needed environment where automated action is required. I recommend the solution for large-scale & medium-scale business units. For small-scale business units, I see the functional value is less.

Incentivized

• Provides insight to container security
• Provides insight to application security
• Shows your compliance and security score
• Gives you information on updates or changes you can make to improve security
• Gives you information on changes you can aid in meeting compliance requirements

• Support for Orgs and Spaces that allow for managing users and deployables within a large organization.
• Easy deployment, deploying code is as simple as executing single line from CLI, thanks to build-packs.
• Solid and rich CLI, that allows for various operations on the instance.
• Isolated Virtual Machines called Droplets, that provide clean run time environment for the code. This used to be a problem with Weblogic and other application servers, where multiple applications are run on the same cluster and they share resources.
• SSH capability for the droplet (isolated VM's are called droplets), that allows for real time viewing of the App code while the application is running.
• Support for multiple languages, thanks to build-packs.
• Support for horizontal scaling, scaling an instance horizontally is a breeze.
• Support for configuring environment variable using the service bindings.
• Supports memory and disk space limit allocation for individual applications.
• Supports API's as well as workers (processes without endpoints)
• Supports blue-green deployment with minimal down time

Incentivized

• Easily assign work/tickets between multiple users
• Supports a wide variety of software integrations
• Easy to manage scheduling tool
• As part of the Splunk toolset, provides detailed levels of data analysis at our engineers fingertips

Incentivized

• Implement password-less CLI Auth flow
• Implement Single button full application tear down
• Provide demo application code for a wider array of technologies, frameworks
• Provide ability to deploy into existing network constraints of large organization

• Does not support stateful containers and that would be a nice to have.
• Supports showing logs, but does not persist the logs anywhere. This makes relying on Cloud Foundry's logs very unreliable. The logs have to be persisted using other third party tools like Elk and Kibana.

Incentivized

• The user interface can be furthe improved
• Licensing needs to be simplified and packaged as a bundle with other Splunk product like Enterprise Security
• Customer outreach can be further enhanced

Incentivized

It was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

Incentivized

Not a lot of love given to VO since the acquisition by Splunk from my POV

Incentivized

VictorOps support has proven excellent for us. Because it is such a widely used tool, there is a lot of documentation on usage, and a large community of users to lean on. Also, many engineers have had experience working with VictorOps already, and the tool is so easy to setup / manage that much support isn't really necessary.

Incentivized

It was a good solution with a good comprimise prize/features for our use cases

Incentivized

Aptible makes managing HIPAA/HITRUST compliance simpler when compared to Microsoft Azure. Passing audits is technically easier when using Aptible. Aptible provides a log drain to deliver logs via Syslog or HTTPS for long-term log storage. Microsoft Azure does not have a portal specifying when controls are in place, something which Aptible does.

Incentivized

While Docker shines in providing support for volumes and stateful instances, Cloud foundry shines in providing support for deploying stateless services. Heroku shines in integrating with Git and using commits to git as hooks to trigger deployments right from the command line. But it does not provide on-premise solution that Cloud foundry provides.

Incentivized

Splunk On-Call integrates better with our Splunk Cybersecurity and Reporting products due to the same family tree of the same eco system. We were previously using built-in on-call from individual applications and while adequate, they were difficult to manage and support SLA varied greatly across different applications. In addition we also used xMatters which did not integrate well with SAP products nor Citrix products so we were still using more than a single on-call product which was solved by implementing Splunk On-Call

Incentivized

• Less time in configuring servers. This is essentially a server-less platform.
• Cost savings by using usage-based cloud
• CLI can be scripted to provide full automation, even though a deployment takes about 20 minutes; that time can be even further reduced and spent elsewhere

• Positive impact, since it simplifies the deployment time by a huge margin. Without cloud foundry, deploying a code needs coordination with infrastructure teams, while with cloud foundry, its a simple one line command. This reduces the deployment time from at least few hours to few minutes. Faster deployments promote faster dev cycle iterations.
• Code maintenance such as upgrading a Node or Java version is as simple as updating the build-pack. Without cloud foundry, using web logic, the specific version only supports a specific version of Java. So updating the version involves upgrading the version of web logic that needs to involve few teams. So without cloud foundry, it takes at least few days, with cloud foundry, its a matter of few mins.
• Overall, happier Developers and thats harder to quantify.

Incentivized

• It runs our on call rotation so it makes it easy for us.
• It integrates with Slack so it makes it easy for us to manage through Slack.

Incentivized