Camunda is a process orchestration tool designed to help organizations design, automate, and improve any process. Built for business and IT collaboration using BPMN and DMN standards, Camunda aims to enable seamless integration across endpoints to transform mission-critical processes.
N/A
Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
N/A
The 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.
Camunda Platform is well suited for scenarios where there are different stages in a business flow and the flow is driven by user action at each stage. For example placing of an order on an ecommerce platform. Depending on whether user was able to make the payment or not the workflow would go to dispatch or retry stage. Now the retry stage would trigger further actions like sending follow up emails etc. Likewise, dispatch stage would have a different set of actions. Since every order is important and we need to know where it stands, using Camunda Platform is imperative. Camunda Platform might not be a right choice where just a one off thing needs to be done. For example, uploading of product information by user or periodic processing of heavy images by a worker. These are all either one step processes or periodic automated processes where we can track the status without using a business modeler like Camunda Platform.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is well suited for day 2 operations. It allows management of hosts after initial deployment in a way that is repeatable. I like to say the 2 I's are the most important thing about Ansible - Idempotency and Inventory. These are the strengths and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform makes those things possible at the Enterprise level. Cost is the biggest area that it is not appropriate. Licensing can be very expensive and may limit some of the use cases.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
Playbook execution result output can sometimes be very messy and hard to understand. Make JSON output pretty and understandable. Allow disclosure triangles to hide/show content and let the playbook dictate that.
Allow for a pop-up review of a playbook's credentials, inventory, or other sub-components instead of forcing a new window or tab within the browser. Allow for quick review or audit.
Allow for stepping through a playbook, step by step, just like a development IDE or programming environment, inspecting variables and output from plays.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
We've found many use cases in our environment where this powerful tool was invaluable. It does take quite a bit to set it up initially, though, and it's hard to get other teams onboarded in a way that gets it running. .yml itself is simple, but there are a lot of components (Credentials, templates) that can be overwhelming. And Jinja syntax can confuse folks.
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.
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.
Lacks good documentation. Training and documentation is geared towards those who are already technically adept. Does not have as many data integrations as other full fledged products. Paid version of Camunda is not as fully fledged as other products.
We were Puppet users. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform made more sense to us because of the focus on Ansible content to support our AIX systems and RHEL systems. We have also seen that the learning curve for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform is better than we experienced in our Puppet deployment.
The positive impact is that we are able to ensure the business process is being followed and that results in orders getting processed successfully leading to customer satisfaction and revenue
Another positive impact is that we are able to track any anomalies and any errors in the order flow and retry them so that users don't have a negative experience.
A negative point is that it is an overhead to maintain so there is significant engineering effort getting invested there
I'd say positive. It helps us meet our compliance requirements consistently and lets us turn things around faster when we find things that are out of compliance because we normally already, once we develop a playbook, it's there, we pick it back up off the shelf and run the same thing again. We don't have to go through an exercise every time or bring somebody else up to speed. The playbook is already out there and just go run it.
