Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
AWS CloudFormation
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
AWS 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
Azure DevOps
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
HashiCorp Vagrant
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Vagrant is a tool designed to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. It leverages a declarative configuration file which describes all software requirements, packages, operating system configuration, and users.N/A
Pricing
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Editions & Modules
Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
$0.00
Handler Operation
$0.0009
per handler operation
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Basic + Test Plan
$52
per user per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Free Trial
YesNoNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo 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 CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Considered Multiple Products
AWS CloudFormation
Chose AWS CloudFormation
Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource.
Azure DevOps

No answer on this topic

HashiCorp Vagrant

No answer on this topic

Features
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Configuration Management
Comparison of Configuration Management features of Product A and Product B
AWS CloudFormation
8.2
2 Ratings
2% above category average
Azure DevOps
-
Ratings
HashiCorp Vagrant
-
Ratings
Infrastructure Automation8.52 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated Provisioning8.52 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Parallel Execution8.02 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Node Management7.52 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Logging7.52 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
Version Control9.02 Ratings00 Ratings00 Ratings
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User Ratings
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend
8.0
(7 ratings)
8.4
(69 ratings)
8.0
(14 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(2 ratings)
7.8
(9 ratings)
5.5
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
-
(0 ratings)
8.1
(11 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
AWS CloudFormationAzure DevOpsHashiCorp Vagrant
Likelihood to Recommend
Amazon AWS
I still give it an 8 because it's one of those tools that just quietly does the heavy lifting for you but it can really test your patience when it breaks esp with deep nested stacks. It's perfect for projects where we need clean consistent environments every time. It's less ideal for quick experimental setups like new EC2 configs or Lambda permission tweaks.
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Microsoft
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
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IBM
I would recommend this tool to a colleague looking to create a repeatably deployable local dev environment based on their staging and production environments. I would recommend this mostly for individuals or teams requiring environments with server-side software such as php, et al. There are likely less processor-heavy and smaller tools for simpler projects.
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Pros
Amazon AWS
  • All resources can segregated based on stacks which provides greater visibility
  • A complete audit trail of what went wrong while deploying a particular resource
  • Automatically rollbacks if any service as part of CloudFormation results in an error
  • The UI tool is useful
Read full review
Microsoft
  • Utilize Git as a repository to share work between multiple users
  • Ability to configure Pipelines to build containers to run virtual deployments and testing scripts.
  • Split individual tasks and relate to master documents for quick navigation and ability to see overall picture of project.
  • Track status of each task
  • Integrate with Git to utilize branches, merging, approvals, history, etc.
Read full review
IBM
  • Vagrant is decentralized so anyone can make a container package to get a project started. you aren't limited to wordpress, or even one style of wordpress install (you can make a sage.io wordpress environment).
  • Vagrant easily lets you set ports and URLs for local development.
  • I have yet to have a problem with Vagrant, as opposed to MAMP and DesktopServer, which both gave me SQL or other issues.
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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
  • The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
  • It could improve the search slightly better.
Read full review
IBM
  • Because Vagrant is a low-level tool with many ways to configure it, there is a steep learning curve. You don't just have to learn (or install) Vagrant, but also Virtualbox, Ansible and possibly some Vagrant plugins to keep boxes up to date.
  • Support on Windows doesn't seem great. I'm a Mac guy, so it's been very difficult getting things to work as expected when a developer wants to work on Windows.
  • Perhaps I didn't configure it correctly, but the default shared folders are not the best for performance. There are also frequently weird issues regarding file permissions.
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Likelihood to Renew
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
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IBM
Vagrant is fast, versatile and does exactly what we need it to do: spin up virtual servers for local development fast and without trouble.
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.
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Microsoft
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
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IBM
A GUI would be nice for entry level users.
Read full review
Support Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Read full review
IBM
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Amazon AWS
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
Was not part of the process.
Read full review
IBM
No answers on this topic
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
Read full review
Microsoft
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
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IBM
I liked lando better because lando seemed extremely easy to setup compared to other VM's and it seemed faster though that project was simpler. Virtualbox I ran on windows and it has a gui and has often been slow. The vagrant boxes I used did well but had slightly more problems than lando.
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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.
Read full review
Microsoft
  • We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
  • We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
  • We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
Read full review
IBM
  • Vagrant is free - It requires a bit of extra technical knowledge in terms of setup, but since it costs nothing it's an excellent resource
  • It can be time consuming to learn, but once you get a good handle on it you're in good shape.
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