AWS OpsWorks is a configuration management service that provides managed instances of Chef and Puppet.
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SUSE Manager
Score 10.0 out of 10
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German company SUSE offers SUSE Manager, a software defined infrastructure Linux server configuration management tool supporting patching, provisioning of Linux servers, and related actions.
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Pricing
AWS OpsWorks
SUSE Manager
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
AWS OpsWorks
SUSE Manager
Free Trial
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No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
AWS OpsWorks
SUSE Manager
Considered Both Products
AWS OpsWorks
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose AWS OpsWorks
Opsworks will become EOL soon and we have been using the recommended Systems Manager solution recently which offers a lot more flexibility in terms of orchestration technology (ie. higher Chef versions) and easier to integrate with even more AWS services.
We first got up and running with OpsWorks about 6~7 years ago, at a time when many of its competitors were far more limited. At the time it made sense as the logical tool to go with and getting up and running on the AWS infrastructure was beneficial for the scale we were …
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 …
We used the open source components of SUSE Manager before which helped - but SUSE Manager merged them together and made working with the tools a lot easier.
I have tested and evaluated Uyuni, which is basically the upstream version of SUSE Manager. We opted for SUSE Manager because we like to have a stable release that is regularly updated and has full support from our vendor.
It's a very convenient way of tracking, monitoring, and auditing reports on our databases. Reduces runtime, complexity to manage IT operations. Meets all security and compliance standards. Great support.
The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux …
I tested Ansible as well, but the product doesn't really compare to SUSE Manager. Ansible is basically defining states for your systems and pushing them. SUSE Manager is a complete one-stop shop for everything a system administrator wants to do to effectively manage their …
AWS Opsworks is good for linking AWS services and setting up and maintaining webservers using Chef. However, it will become EOL soon so we would not recommend starting new projects using it and instead go for the recommended Systems Manager setup
In our specific use case, SUSE Manager is extremely useful. We're having a large landscape that is divided into intake, development, quality and production with a couple of different SUSE flavours that need to be automatically rolled out, configured, patched and maintained, everything from up to date repositories that are cloned on a daily basis straight from SUSE.
The interface is quite intuitive and allows you to discover and easily find what you want to do and what other features are within OpsWorks.
Chef integration is pretty seamless and there are a good set of options and operating systems to choose from
It makes things like auto scaling set up, either via load or time, more straight forward and intuitive than what you'd typically see via the EC2 console
The gui is extremely user friendly. The installation and configuration does have a learning curve, it takes a while to set everything up. But once you're passed this initial learning curve, everything is very intuitive. If you want extra automation, there's an api (eventough i personally find the documentation of the api could be ordered better). I gave this product a 9 because of the initial learning curve and the api documentation, but for the rest it suits my needs perfectly.
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.
SUSE Manager provided a top-tier support person on site to us for two days to help integration. We did all the standard stuff they help with before he arrived. We were able to use him to get all the tricky stuff identified and solved in the short time we had. Had they sent us a lower-tier guy, it would have been a waste. I was impressed they sent such knowledgeable person.
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.
The other competitors also have a good platform and service, but we went with SUSE due to cost. The price was best and we needed to keep under a certain budget. The functionality was perfect for what we needed so we took the step forward. This allows us to manage our Linux environment within the manager and update or deploy specific tasks to each as needed.
OpsWorks allowed us to access the AWS infrastructure with a considerably lower time investment than we would have otherwise needed when we first implemented it.
Since we've been running with OpsWorks we've experienced very little downtime and it's required relatively little maintenance.
The main downside of using OpsWorks for us is that it has locked us into a very specific infrastructure that doesn't have the flexibility of many of the newer infrastructure management tools, this may lead to a painful migration down the road. We also run a risk of long outage if it ever does introduce breaking changes as the skillset needed to work with the OpsWorks tooling is very specific not widely available in our company.
