AWS CloudFormation vs. BiZZdesign HoriZZon (Enterprise Studio)

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

I would not recommend using BizzDesign. For Enterprise Architecture, like business strategy, business process modelling, IT architectures there are better and in most cases less expensive tools.

• SaaS
• Paas
• Iaas
• On promises

Incentivized

• Archimate support is as defined in the Archimate standard.

• 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

• Usability of the tool is quite bad.
• It is tedious to even create simple reports. Created reports are published as image, so basically not usable for end users.
• Support of other model languages than Archimate is less supported. In ERD you do not even have a layout functionality.
• Any state of the art integrations like cloud stencils are missing.
• Import/export with Excel is tedious and SQL import not fully implemented.

Support for simple questions is okay. For some more elaborate things, also tool errors, you may not get even an answer for months/more than a year.

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

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

Incentivized

• We were not able to get much benefit from the tool. Some users and partner teams meanwhile moved on to other software.