AWS Config vs. AWS OpsWorks vs. CloudBolt

It's really good if your infrastructure services is all in AWS, that means everything could be audited and monitored using AWS config. You also can create alarms to notify you or your team about any changes on your AWS resources which is very useful to prevent abuse if you have a fairly large team. It's also very useful whenever some third party wants to audit your AWS resources, if you have a fairly comprehensive AWS config configured, the auditing process will be easy since they only need to look at your AWS config setup.

Incentivized

Where you already have some Chef recipes to build your application boxes and are happy to run directly on VMs, OpsWorks really shines. It won't do anything too complex for you, so it only really works well for simple stacks (load balancers, application layers, database layers). If you want to do more complex infrastructure, Cloudformation or Terraform are probably worth looking at.

Incentivized

I think it's great for giving any/all users the ability to deploy servers for whatever they want. It's also great for scaling up/down large quantities of servers. It also has some pretty good plugins and "orchestration actions" that you can write for yourself. I don't think it would be best suited if you want to set and forget it. It needs some TLC, and the interface and initial setup [are] not the most user-friendly. So if you're planning on using it for some complex tasks, make sure you have someone dedicated to it, at least for the initial setup. And make sure you have monitoring on it.

Incentivized

• The ability to track changes in AWS is paramount, AWS config allows you to do this
• Allows the auditing of an AWS account
• Can view history of an account that has AWS config enabled

Incentivized

• connect between serveral AWS services (EC2, RDS, ELB)
• easy configuration management deployment via Chef

Incentivized

• Create configuration with Microsoft endpoints.
• Support complex globally distributed multi-domains.
• Create and remove dynamic OU.
• Allows for static text in combination with dynamic content.

Incentivized

• It's only AWS, no third party.
• Not the most intuitive interface, but with a little getting used to it is OK.

Incentivized

• Getting up and running with OpsWorks is a very technical and potentially time-consuming process. You need to know the ins and outs of Chef/Puppet if you really want to get into it and there isn't a convenient way to test out the environment locally so debugging can be time-consuming.
• To take advantage of some of the newer AWS instance types you need to be running on a VPC, which again is a pain if you don't have a DevOps team.
• The error logs and monitoring metrics in OpsWorks are pretty basic and haven't changed much over the years.

Incentivized

• Support could be improved on a >tier 1 level
• Logging could be more descriptive/specific
• Stability of the actual server

Incentivized

Would rate lower for other workloads but for AWS workloads its simple to set up, cost effective and customisable. Primary use case is compliance from a governance perspective.

Incentivized

Unless you pay for a pricey support package getting support on OpsWorks will be pretty slow. Documentation is also relatively limited and sometimes hard to follow when compared to competitors. Generally, we've been able to get the answers we need from OpsWorks support when we run into problems but don't expect rapid responses.

Incentivized

I do not know or have used any other product in AWS cloud space that matches what AWS Config provides. We have some custom built monitoring and governance, however that is there because AWS Config does not provide it currently.

Incentivized

OpsWorks isn't really a direct competitor to Terraform/Cloudformation, but it does allow you to do some of the more simple things on offer quite quickly and effectively. Opsworks was used for this reason, along with existing internal knowledge of Chef. Along with some of the other services on offer from AWS, it is good to use as a stepping stone along the way when building your systems - or perhaps it would be entirely suitable for a fairly simple project.

Incentivized

We selected SovLabs Microsoft Active Directory because is one of the best automation tools for Active Directory. The tool offers a lot of features that we use. Good support from the vendor and a good community. I strongly recommend SovLabs Microsoft Active Directory for automation. The tools does a great job.

Incentivized

• Enforcing audit requirements
• Easy to set up alerting when there are rule breaches
• Auto remediation reduces the manual policing of such breaches

Incentivized

• very quick way of creating new infrastructure
• low maintenance costs
• easy to create high availability setups thus reducing costs

Incentivized

• We have invested countless man hours to troubleshooting and being support's QA.
• Most of our teams have saved an invaluable amount of time by being able to automate their deployments.
• After the initial time you spend [understanding] all the nuances, the configuring of groups, permissions, etc., does make administering it easier.

Incentivized