Azure Functions enables users to execute event-driven serverless code functions with an end-to-end development experience.
$18
per month approximately
Control-M
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Control-M from BMC is a platform for integrating, automating, and orchestrating application and data workflows in production across complex hybrid technology ecosystems. It provides deep operational capabilities, delivering speed, scale, security, and governance.
They're great to embed logic and code in a medium-small, cloud-native application, but they can become quite limiting for complex, enterprise applications.
Control-M is a reliable and well-developed product with excellent vendor support that updates and expands the software often and offers a cloud-based deployment choice. When there are many Batch processes in IT operations that need to be monitored and controlled to ensure IT services, Control-M is ideally suited for centralized workload automation and task management.
They natively integrate with many triggers from other Azure services, like Blob Storage or Event Grid, which is super handy when creating cloud-native applications on Azure (data wrangling pipelines, business process automation, data ingestion for IoT, ...)
They natively support many common languages and frameworks, which makes them easily approachable by teams with a diverse background
They are cheap solutions for low-usage or "seasonal" applications that exhibits a recurring usage/non-usage pattern (batch processing, montly reports, ...)
Control-M provides a single, centralized interface for monitoring and managing all batch processes in the organization. Nothing is hidden or left unattended in a timely manner.
The proper use of the BIM component has allowed the change of paradigm in the operation, adopting a proactive management instead of the typical reactive management in the event of production failures.
The use of Forecast and production simulations allows you to identify bottlenecks and focus first on managing those failures that have the greatest impact on production SLAs.
Control-M/Change Manager has arrived to shorten development cycles from requirements gathering to production testing. It has been a utility that monetizes the development of Jobs meshes.
The GUI is capable of efficiently handling more than 80,000 jobs per day. This is certainly a challenge in designing a good user experience. I don't know if there is a reasonable limit to this. One of my clients runs more than 80,000 Jobs daily and the GUI remains smooth all the time.
Job-As-Code is a DevOps accelerator that has just begun to be adopted. Its implementation will make workload management even more cost-effective.
My biggest complaint is that they promote a development model that tightly couples the infrastructure with the app logic. This can be fine in many scenarios, but it can take some time to build the right abstractions if you want to decouple you application from this deployment model. This is true at least using .NET functions.
In some points, they "leak" their abstraction and - from what I understood - they're actually based on the App Service/Web App "WebJob SDK" infrastructure. This makes sense, since they also share some legacy behavior from their ancestor.
For larger projects, their mixing of logic, code and infrastructure can become difficult to manage. In these situations, good App Services or brand new Container Apps could be a better fit.
As with most of the mainframe software products, documentation seems to be the weak link for the products - written by people and for people who already know what they need to do, not for people who are trying to figure how to use the product.
We are a large JES3 mainframe shop. As with all vendors who still provide software for mainframe systems, software is generally designed and developed for JES2 and is frequently not fully tested in a JES3 environment before being shipped out.
It is a great product plain and simple. We've had Control-M for 20+ years and the support that BMC Software provides is really second to none. There is always a situation that someone can think of where I have to say, "No we can't do that", however I'm confident that we've been able to meet and most of the time exceed our end user expectations with what the product can offer them.
Control-M's overall usability is very good because it is simple to use. Control-M SelfService is an easy tool to give to some of the users who want to use a web interface. The training curve for most users is very short and most of the functions are very simple to figure out.
Although the product is very stable there have been a few incidents when I needed support. I have worked with technicians from all around the globe because of the rolling support. This gives me the quickest support when I need it most in those early hours of the morning. The technicians I have worked with have been very knowledgeable and if necessary got help when needed.
This is the most straightforward and easy-to-implement server less solution. App Service is great, but it's designed for websites, and it cannot scale automatically as easily as Azure Functions. Container Apps is a robust and scalable choice, but they need much more planning, development and general work to implement. Container Instances are the same as Container Apps, but they are extremely more limited in termos of capacity. Kubernetes Service si the classic pod container on Azure, but it requires highly skilled professional, and there are not many scenario where it should be used, especially in smaller teams.
We last reviewed the market in 2001 (schedulers are long-term commitments!) and Control-M edged (by a very narrow margin) the Tivoli alternative, with Dollar Universe (now part of Automic) back in third place. We also tested the Tidal Software scheduler (now part of Cisco) but I cannot see that listed here. Control-M won out through reliability and cross-platform support. Since we made our choice it has become clear that Control-M has moved ahead of the alternatives.
They allowed me to create solutions with low TCO for the customer, which loves the result and the low price, that helped me create solutions for more clients in less time.
You can save up to 100% of your compute bill, if you stay under a certain tenant conditions.
I would expect this product to give a positive return on investment. Running jobs in cron for example would require a lot more scripting effort to ensure that the proper notifications are done on failures. With the built in functionality in Control-M the effort would be greatly reduced
