AWS CloudFormation vs HockeyApp

Overview

HockeyApp

Stacks164

Followers158

Votes38

AWS CloudFormation

Stacks1.6K

Followers1.3K

Votes88

AWS CloudFormation vs HockeyApp: What are the differences?

Developers describe AWS CloudFormation as "Create and manage a collection of related AWS resources". You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work. On the other hand, HockeyApp is detailed as "Manage your betas and collect live crash reports for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and OS X apps". HockeyApp is the best way to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage.

AWS CloudFormation can be classified as a tool in the "Infrastructure Build Tools" category, while HockeyApp is grouped under "Beta Testing / Mobile App Distribution".

Some of the features offered by AWS CloudFormation are:

AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt)
No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack)
Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.

On the other hand, HockeyApp provides the following key features:

Crash Reports- HockeyApp offers the most reliable and complete crash reporting for beta and App Store versions using open source frameworks. Providing full server-side symbolication with class names, methods, line numbers, and automatic grouping of similar crash reports.
Feedback- HockeyApp allows you to communicate with your customers. Users can create a support request, post an idea, or discuss a problem right from within the app.
Distribution- Upload your beta versions to HockeyApp and distribute them to your beta testers. Integrate our open-source SDK and your app will automatically be able to detect updates and offer the updates right within the app.Analytics- By integrating our SDK into your app, you'll get advanced metrics to get a better overview of the testing for your app. See which devices were tested, which testers used the app for how long, and which language was tested.

"Automates infrastructure deployments" is the primary reason why developers consider AWS CloudFormation over the competitors, whereas "Crash analytics" was stated as the key factor in picking HockeyApp.

Expedia.com, Redox Engine, and TimeHop are some of the popular companies that use AWS CloudFormation, whereas HockeyApp is used by Harvest, Pubu, and OrderUp. AWS CloudFormation has a broader approval, being mentioned in 197 company stacks & 77 developers stacks; compared to HockeyApp, which is listed in 50 company stacks and 11 developer stacks.

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Advice on HockeyApp, AWS CloudFormation

Timothy

SRE

Mar 20, 2020

Decided

I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:

I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.

I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:

It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.

385k views385k

Comments

Daniel

May 4, 2020

Decided

Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.

426k views426k

Comments

Sergey

Contractor at Adaptive

Apr 17, 2020

Decided

Overview

We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.

Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.

Advantages

Terraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.

Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.

Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.

Disadvantages

Software is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.

Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.

Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.

426k views426k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

HockeyApp	AWS CloudFormation
HockeyApp is the best way to collect live crash reports, get feedback from your users, distribute your betas, and analyze your test coverage.	You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.
Crash Reports- HockeyApp offers the most reliable and complete crash reporting for beta and App Store versions using open source frameworks. Providing full server-side symbolication with class names, methods, line numbers, and automatic grouping of similar crash reports.;Feedback- HockeyApp allows you to communicate with your customers. Users can create a support request, post an idea, or discuss a problem right from within the app.;Distribution- Upload your beta versions to HockeyApp and distribute them to your beta testers. Integrate our open-source SDK and your app will automatically be able to detect updates and offer the updates right within the app.Analytics- By integrating our SDK into your app, you'll get advanced metrics to get a better overview of the testing for your app. See which devices were tested, which testers used the app for how long, and which language was tested.	AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt);No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack);Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.;Declarative and Flexible – To create the infrastructure you want, you enumerate what AWS resources, configuration values and interconnections you need in a template and then let AWS CloudFormation do the rest with a few simple clicks in the AWS Management Console, via the command line tools or by calling the APIs.
Statistics
Stacks 164	Stacks 1.6K
Followers 158	Followers 1.3K
Votes 38	Votes 88
Pros & Cons
Pros 17 Crash analytics 11 Cross-platform 5 Mobile application distribution 2 JIRA Integration 2 Open source	Pros 43 Automates infrastructure deployments 21 Declarative infrastructure and deployment 13 No more clicking around 3 Atomic 3 Any Operative System you want Cons 4 Brittle 2 No RBAC and policies in templates
Integrations
Hipmob	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to HockeyApp, AWS CloudFormation?

TestFlight

With TestFlight, developers simply upload a build, and the testers can install it directly from their device, over the air.

Packer

Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.

TestFairy

When testing apps in the crowd, you never know what exactly was done, and what went wrong on the client side. TestFairy shows you a video of the exact test that was done, including CPU, memory, GPS, network and a lot more.

Beta by Crashlytics

A streamlined solution for distributing apps that gives you a single, cross-platform toolset for iOS and Android, and a delightful, effortless onboarding for your testers.

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

Azure Resource Manager

It is the deployment and management service for Azure. It provides a management layer that enables you to create, update, and delete resources in your Azure subscription. You use management features, like access control, locks, and tags, to secure and organize your resources after deployment.

Habitat

Habitat is a new approach to automation that focuses on the application instead of the infrastructure it runs on. With Habitat, the apps you build, deploy, and manage behave consistently in any runtime — metal, VMs, containers, and PaaS. You'll spend less time on the environment and more time building features.

Google Cloud Deployment Manager

Google Cloud Deployment Manager allows you to specify all the resources needed for your application in a declarative format using yaml.

Fabric by Twitter

Installing and managing a wide range of SDKs can be cumbersome and complex. Fabric solves this problem by combining all seven of our SDKs under one roof and organizing them into three Kits: the Crashlytics Kit, the Twitter Kit, and the MoPub Kit.

Related Comparisons

Some of the features offered by AWS CloudFormation are:

AWS CloudFormation comes with the following ready-to-run sample templates: WordPress (blog),Tracks (project tracking), Gollum (wiki used by GitHub), Drupal (content management), Joomla (content management), Insoshi (social apps), Redmine (project mgmt)
No Need to Reinvent the Wheel – A template can be used repeatedly to create identical copies of the same stack (or to use as a foundation to start a new stack)
Transparent and Open – Templates are simple JSON formatted text files that can be placed under your normal source control mechanisms, stored in private or public locations such as Amazon S3 and exchanged via email.

On the other hand, HockeyApp provides the following key features:

Crash Reports- HockeyApp offers the most reliable and complete crash reporting for beta and App Store versions using open source frameworks. Providing full server-side symbolication with class names, methods, line numbers, and automatic grouping of similar crash reports.
Feedback- HockeyApp allows you to communicate with your customers. Users can create a support request, post an idea, or discuss a problem right from within the app.
Distribution- Upload your beta versions to HockeyApp and distribute them to your beta testers. Integrate our open-source SDK and your app will automatically be able to detect updates and offer the updates right within the app.Analytics- By integrating our SDK into your app, you'll get advanced metrics to get a better overview of the testing for your app. See which devices were tested, which testers used the app for how long, and which language was tested.

AWS CloudFormation vs HockeyApp