AWS CloudFormation vs. National Instruments SystemLink

AWS CloudFormation

National Instruments SystemLink

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting 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
SystemLink	Score 4.0 out of 10	N/A	National Instruments headquartered in Austin offers SystemLink, a software platform for managing system configurationt tasks, device management, software deployment, to improve system uptime and performance.	N/A

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

National Instruments SystemLink

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

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	SystemLink
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

There 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.

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More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	AWS CloudFormation	National Instruments SystemLink
Top Pros	Pro Create multiple Pro Easy to build Pro Defined templates	Pro User interface
Top Cons	Minus Use cases Minus Time to create Minus Live support	No answers on this topic

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	AWS CloudFormation	National Instruments SystemLink
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User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	National Instruments SystemLink
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (5 ratings)	4.0 (1 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	National Instruments SystemLink
Likelihood to Recommend	Amazon AWS 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	NI (National Instruments) There are definitely scenarios where NI SystemLink will be useful but just didn't work out well for us. I needed to be able to replace an EXE file on a computer with a new EXE to do the upgrades but I was not able to do that through SystemLink. You had to work with packages in order to perform this and I didn't want to revamp my distribution plan. We also didn't need to do any asset management or calibration documentation through SystemLink. I was excited about being able to view data from the test stations through a browser but our engineers need historical data available and everything resets to a live view when you click back to the UI. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	Amazon AWS SaaS Paas Iaas On promises Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	NI (National Instruments) Setup User Interface LabVIEW Integration Incentivized Verified User Anonymous 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	NI (National Instruments) Licensing Not able to see data from all test stations on one UI Lack of data history Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Amazon AWS 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	NI (National Instruments) No answers on this topic
Return on Investment	Amazon AWS It has a positive ROI Less time inverted in bugs More stable source code Incentivized Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Read full review	NI (National Instruments) Availability to monitor multiple test stations remotely Was quick to integrate into existing LabVIEW codebase Ultimately did not justify the licensing cost for the benefit Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots