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AWS CloudFormation vs. Google Cloud AI vs. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AWS CloudFormation

    Score8.2 out of 10
    N/AAWS 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

    Google Cloud AI

    Score8.7 out of 10
    N/AGoogle Cloud AI provides modern machine learning services, with pre-trained models and a service to generate tailored models.N/A

    Ansible

    Score9.1 out of 10
    N/AThe Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.

    $5,000

    per year

    Pricing
    AWS CloudFormationGoogle Cloud AIAnsible
    Editions & Modules
    Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account
    $0.00
    Handler Operation
    $0.0009
    per handler operation
    No answers on this topic
    Basic Tower
    5,000
    per year
    Enterprise Tower
    10,000
    per year
    Premium Tower
    14,000
    per year
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AWS CloudFormationGoogle Cloud AIAnsible
    Free Trial
    YesNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    YesNoNo
    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 CloudFormationGoogle Cloud AIAnsible
    Considered Multiple Products
    Amazon AWS
    Chose AWS CloudFormation
    The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform …
    Incentivized
    Chose AWS CloudFormation
    As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform
    Incentivized
    Google
    No answer on this topic
    Red Hat
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    99%
    Would buy again
    265 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    210 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    86%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    98%
    Happy with the feature set
    263 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    86%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    97%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    166 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    7 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    201 Answers
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    User Ratings
    AWS CloudFormationGoogle Cloud AIAnsible
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    8.8
    (292 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    9.2
    (8 ratings)
    Usability
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.3
    (184 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.7
    (5 ratings)
    Support Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.3
    (3 ratings)
    8.0
    (5 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.6
    (5 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AWS CloudFormationGoogle Cloud AIAnsible
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Google
    Google Cloud AI is a wonderful product for companies that are looking to offset AI and ML processing power to cloud APIs, and specific Machine Learning use cases to APIs as well. For companies that are looking for very specific, customized ML capabilities that require lots of fine-tuning, it may be better to do this sort of processing through open-source libraries locally, to offset the costs that your company might incur through this API usage.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    I think it's the best defacto orchestrator for automation because it's so easy to integrate in other tools to it (dynatrace, cyberark, terraform, etc). It is a lot for a new or smaller team to use so I wouldn't recommend it to a new team using Ansible, in that case using Ansible navigator is a better start to understanding playbooks/inventories before diving into the complexity of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. EDA also takes a lot of connectivity between Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and target systems to get working which can be difficult in very locked down envs unless you have approval from many other teams like networking and security.
    Incentivized
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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
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • good conversion from the voice to the text
    • speed in the conversion from voice to text
    • time-saving in the conversion activity
    • analysis of the results of the conversion in real time
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Standardize controls and visibility for automation.
    • Provide RBAC and Vault for improved automation security and support.
    • Job Scheduling is much more effective than Cron or other home-grown solutions.
    • The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform API is one of the best features as it makes automation accessible from any other platform.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Google
    • Some of the build in/supported AI modules that can be deployed, for example Tensorflow, do not have up-to-date documentation so what is actually implemented in the latest rev is not what is mentioned in the documentation, resulting in a lot of debugging time.
    • Customization of existing modules and libraries is harder and it does need time and experience to learn.
    • Google Cloud AI can do a better job in providing better support for Python and other coding languages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    • Ansible is still not truly declarative like Terraform.
    • Simple automation is fine, but creating complex, scalable automation scripts is very difficult to learn.
    • For a higher number of nodes, Ansible consumes a lot of resources. It needs the paid version of AAP, which requires a cost.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    We are extremely satisfied with the impact that this tool has made on our organization since we have practically moved from crawling to walking in the process of generating information for our main task to investigate in the field through interviews. With the audio to text translation tool there is a difference from heaven to earth in the time of feeding our internal data.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    We are extremely happy with the use of AAP. It's better than expected, There is almost no limit when thinking of automation. The only problem is that the day to day is consuming a big part of our time. Patching and checking vulnerabilities are virtually killing us. But we can only improve with AAP.
    Incentivized
    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.
    Incentivized
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    Google
    I give 8 because although it´s a tool I really enjoy working with, I think Google Cloud AI's impact is just starting, therefore I can visualize a lot/space of improvements in this tool. As an example the application of AI in international environments with different languages is a good example of that space/room to improve.
    Read full review
    Red Hat
    Everything has room for improvement, but Ansible is the best tool out there for what it does and what it can do. There are plenty of features and capabilities that can be added, but it's just a matter of time before it happens.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    No answers on this topic
    Red Hat
    Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    Every rep has been nice and helpful whenever I call for help. One of the systems froze and wouldn't start back up and with the help of our assigned rep we got everything back up in a timely manner. This helped us not lose customers and money.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Google
    In fact, you only need the basic tech knowledge to do a Google search. You need to know if your organization requires it or not,. our organization required it. And that is why we acquired it and solved a need that we had been suffering from. This is part of the modernization of an organization and part of its growth as a company.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    I spoke on this topic today!
    Incentivized
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    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
    Incentivized
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    Google
    These are basic tools although useful, you can't simply ignore them or say they are not good. These tools also have their own values. But, Yes, Google is an advanced one, A king in the field of offering a wide range of tools, quality, speed, easy to use, automation, prebuild, and cost-effective make them a leader and differentiate them from others.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    AAP compares favorably with Terraform and Power Automate. I don't have much experience with Terraform, but I find AAP and Ansible easier to use as well as having more capabilities. Power Platform is also an excellent automation tool that is user friendly but I feel that Ansible has more compatibility with a variety of technologies.
    Incentivized
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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.
    Incentivized
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    Google
    • Artificial intelligence and automation seems 'free' and draws the organization in, without seeming to spend a lot of funds. A positive impact, but who is actually tracking the cost?
    • We want our employees to use it, but many resist technology or are scared of it, so we need a way to make them feel more comfortable with the AI.
    • The ROI seems positive since we are full in with Google, and the tools come along with the functionality.
    Incentivized
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    Red Hat
    • First, it keeps our entire server infrastructure aligned with our standards and reduces the time and effort needed to maintain our systems.
    • Automate routine IT tasks to save time, reduce errors, and ensure every server is configured and updated consistently.
    • Tasks that used to take our teams weeks to complete manually now run automatically and reliably, with full visibility, making our infrastructure management more effective and our compliance tracking much easier.
    Incentivized
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    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