AWS CloudFormation vs. Digital.ai Release

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.

Incentivized

Mainly used in release management where all deployments are well managed and processed further based on the approval system. Complete enterprise-level solution with minor difficulties which need to be added to product improvement features. Integration with other CI-CD tools makes it easier to perform tasks in terms of release and deployments.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Cross-team release workflow control using email, texts, scripts allow our release management to be truly a 360 process.
• XL Release allowing our Jenkins toolchain to control the beginning of release trains which is very powerful.
• XL release allows us to expose the business process flow for anyone to read direct at the source which runs the process instead of a separate vision.

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

• Pagination of data - across tool.
• User Roles Management API can be improved.
• Case insensitive ID's are treated differently making user face login and access issues.
• Dependency on Universal template/custom plugins creation should be reduced.
• Code versioning of templates is very difficult.
• Better error handling.
• Futures Timeout Issues.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The tool is easy to use, easy to navigate and learn. Manages releases with proper approvals in a systematic manner. Though it needs minor improvements in terms of pagination (data loading), access management, but, overall the tool helps in increasing productivity and less time for production deployments.

Incentivized

Support is not good at all. To this day, I have to mail my queries and their support site does not log in for me (me alone). But, upon contacting many times, no one helps with a proper response. Though good thing is, I get a proper response over mail too. But, being informative about the tool and not on the issues faced by users outside of the process to get support should also be addressed equally. Which is currently missing in support.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

XL release is simpler to configure and deploy to the organization than other change management platforms I have used. That simplicity has minor drawbacks requiring you to fit into a limited set of control methods but that exercise helped us simplify a needlessly onerous process.

Incentivized

• + We can standup a VPC in minutes
• - It took a lot of inital time to set up
• + With logging/rollback, made testing much easier.

Incentivized

• XL release has improved our consistency of release process, removing multiple days worth of manual status checking and coordination.
• XL release has allowed us to increase the number of beta releases we can support due to simplifying our release actions.

Incentivized