AWS CloudFormation vs. Microsoft System Center

Microsoft System Center

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
AWS CloudFormation	Score 8.8 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
Microsoft System Center	Score 9.0 out of 10	N/A	Microsoft System Center Suite is a family of IT management software for network monitoring, updating and patching, endpoint protection with anti-malware, data protection and backup, ITIL- structured IT service management, remote administration and more. It is available in two editions: standard and datacenter. Datacenter provides unlimited virtualization for high density private clouds, while standard is for lightly or non-virtualized private cloud workloads.	$1,323

Pricing

AWS CloudFormation

Microsoft System Center

Editions & Modules

Free Tier - 1,000 Handler Operations per Month per Account: $0.00
Handler Operation: $0.0009
per handler operation

Standard Edition: $1323
Datacenter Edition: $3607

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
AWS CloudFormation	Microsoft System Center
Free Trial
Yes	No
Free/Freemium Version
Yes	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	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	Microsoft System Center
Considered Both Products	AWS CloudFormation Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation As we have our whole infrastructure on AWS, that is why we selected AWS CloudFormation. AWS CloudFormation is better integrated with AWS services than other available products and also provides visibility and tracking on AWS. AWS CloudFormation is free while Terraform … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation 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 … Incentivized Helpful? Manuela Jacqueline Mercado Rodríguez Senior Full Stack Developer Chose AWS CloudFormation AWS CloudFormation has more features and robustness. It is suited for professional projects since it provides stability and a wide variety of options for configurations. These include not only dividing stacks by specific code changes, but also in regions. This allows more … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose AWS CloudFormation The only real comparison would be to Terraform, which is another IaC technology at the infra level. Terraform is cloud-agnostic, which means most popular cloud providers are supported. While AWS CloudFormation is AWS-only. Although, if you consider CDK, CDK for Terraform … Incentivized Helpful?	Microsoft System Center Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center The versatility of the suite of application provided by the Microsoft experience center was way above the other competitors , it helped gained leverage over the other products in the market . That why we made the decision of choosing Microsoft system center as a infrastructure … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We use Azure, we have lisences, so we have no needs any other cost. And also, we want to save backup data in Azure. Veritas ask additional cost reagurally and have to rebuild bakcup environment. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Because Datadog was too small, we decided quickly to use Microsoft System Center. We use a lot of other Microsoft products so that discussion was quickly set internally. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We have used Ghost from Symantec (licensed), FOG and Clonezilla which are freeware products. All three products had their pros and cons. The two freeware products were functional but did lack some polish, and Ghost was a good product for imaging of desktop computers. All did … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We previously used a mix of FOG and Clonezilla to image machines. The biggest issues with these products is that changing one piece of the image required you to rebuild the entire image itself. These pieces of software also did not allow you to manage applications and Windows … Incentivized Helpful? AC Andry Campos Soporte Técnico Chose Microsoft System Center SysAid, Acronis Advanced Backup (formerly Cyber Backup Cloud) and SmartDeploy Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We are using Microsoft products for a long time, so the overall confidence played a part in the decision, the feature set and licensing cost was also very high when compared with above products, so we decided to use System Center for our environment, so far it has solved many … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Microsoft Access Incentivized Helpful? AH Amy Howard Computer and Network Spec Chose Microsoft System Center Microsoft System Center has more options. Microsoft System Center has the ability to image PCs as well as remotely connect to PCs, and software installation and patching where Symantec Ghost Solution Suite didn't handle all of these options as well. We haven't looked at many … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Much better UI for system center. Also, Tivoli was discontinued, so it was an easy decision. Altiris was acquired by Symantec but was unreliable and painful. It's UI was unresponsive and generally outdated. It wouldn't clean up old packages and would hog GB of disk space, … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I would say Microsoft System Center and Oracle were about the same. Oracle seemed to be a little more user-friendly, but for the most part, they are both comparable. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center Because it rocks and it just works. With the other software, you would have to do a lot of monkey work to make it work. Incentivized Helpful? Mark Fitzgerald Adjunct Professor Chose Microsoft System Center I have used ZENworks, Altiris, and Landesk. They are all good products in their own right and have many strengths. The pricing, bundling SCCM with our Microsoft site license, really helps create an ROI that puts SCCM over the top. Pricing aside it is a tool designed by … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I have not chosen this software directly because I found myself in an environment that already used this product, a purely Microsoft environment. Therefore the choice that has been made has proved very effective and above all suited to our needs, and for this reason, no … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center I have not had any experience with another system that you would image computers other than manually imaging them locally with an image. Incentivized Helpful? Tuan Pham Infrastructure Administrator Chose Microsoft System Center Everything we have is on a Microsoft operating system, so it makes sense to use it. Incentivized Helpful? Brandon Pelinka Senior Systems Engineer Chose Microsoft System Center It's better than others because Microsoft knows its own OS better than anyone. It has a very rich feature set and allows companies to hit many areas of need with one tool. You can have IT staff get multiple tasks done just by logging in and they don't even have to leave their … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose Microsoft System Center We built our POC of the private cloud with vRealize Suite and Microsoft System Center. We are VMware shop so we thought the vrealize will be solution for us but we found pretty fast the vrealize suite is very limited and very expensive compare to Microsoft. With System Center … Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	AWS CloudFormation	Microsoft System Center
Small Businesses	HashiCorp Terraform Score 8.5 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Medium-sized Companies	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	No answers on this topic
Enterprises	Ansible Score 9.2 out of 10	No answers on this topic
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	AWS CloudFormation	Microsoft System Center
Likelihood to Recommend	7.6 (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	9.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	- (0 ratings)	8.0 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	AWS CloudFormation	Microsoft System Center
Likelihood to Recommend	Cloning a virtual machine creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the original. The new virtual machine is configured with the Cloning 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 Resource Management Guide. For information 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 virtual hardware, installed software 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 Resource Management Guide. For information 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	We used a product before that was designed to prevent users making changes and saving files to the desktop computer. This required a renewal of the license. By using SCCM in our environment we were able to discontinue using that product because SCCM allows us to completely restore a machine back to the original configuration. We have taught our users to save their individual work on either a network drive or a cloud drive. By doing this, if we do a re-image of their machine they have lost no data, and it makes for a faster resolution. In some instances having a computer in our SCCM environment it can become cumbersome when creating new users for very specific purposes. It can be done by creating new organizational units and applying new policies but when in a pinch it can be frustrating. For the most part we have tried to make "new" purpose images and groups to at least accommodate a quick install. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Pros	IaC, transactional on top of that Support for "mainstream" general programming languages Sharable IaC "snippets" that can setup standardized environments for individuals quickly OOP techniques are available thanks to OOP languages Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Provides our users the ability to deploy and manage our own datacenter based on defined software with understandable solutions for storage, compute, networking and security. We are able to update at once all the computers from all departments without having to install the OS on every computer. It allows us to have everything in one place for database management and datacenter inspection as well. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Cons	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	Needs web based storefront for requesting new software Needs ability to manage the packaging work flow better Sometimes is slow to download and there is no indication the entire catalog is being loaded, resulting in confused users not being able to find common software in the available list. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Usability	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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	No matter our issues with the software, its ability to centrally manage systems, patch, image, and remote help users has far exceeded our timeliness to help staff. Its ability to keep current, enable us to keep the network secure, and standardize our end-user experience has saved us many hours, dollars, and time every day. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	No answers on this topic	If I had to dislike something about the system it would be how much it changes once you upgrade. This could be more of a problem of mine since I get used to one way and don't like it when it changes so much. I am enjoying the newest update, but it is a mess when you are actually going through the upgrades. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Alternatives Considered	Since the product I'm involved is primarily hosted on AWS we use CloudFormation but in some other products where we have hybrid cloud deployments we prefer Terraform which is opensource. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	None. We are a Microsoft business, and this is THE tool for imaging, packaging, remote support, and antivirus management. Microsoft's tool is the best for managing its software, systems, and antivirus clients. I will say that Microsoft Intune, the cloud platform, can be used for those with heavy 365 usage, but for us, that does not meet our current company needs. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Return on Investment	+ 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 Verified User Anonymous Read full review	We have been able to automate our patch management, firmware and other security concerns. We have a standardized "image" ensuring our setup is consistent across the enterprise. This alone has saved us in time to support and time to understand how to use our desktops. Incentivized Mark Fitzgerald Adjunct Professor Read full review
ScreenShots	AWS CloudFormation Screenshots