AWS CloudFormation vs. Rackspace OpenStack

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

Need to get an application up and running, then I would say the open stack is a great place to test it out. Why spend time setting things up when you can let them do it for you? Many people also have experience with using Rackspace in some capacity so its an easier learning curve for many people.

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

• Quick uptime
• Simple Signup
• Lots of options on what you need
• Rackspace is a known company (not some unknown startup)

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

• Support does not seem to be what it use to be, use to be a solid 10 when dealing with them, now more like an 8
• Pricing can be tricky to figure out
• For some people too many options.

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

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

I looked into going with Amazon EC2, was very comparable in pricing, services, options, etc. and a bit cheaper too. Why I did not go with Amazon mainly has to do with knowing Rackspace and being familiar with them. It was easier for me to use a Rackspace product then go with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

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

• Quick setup allowed me to work on the application not setup of where it was going to run
• Expand ability with a few clicks was a great help, no worrying about if I needed more "power", few clicks and I had it.
• Tech support is hit or miss so that can be problematic and that was cause for concern and took time away from development

Incentivized