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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
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  5. AWS CloudFormation vs RightScale vs Scalr

AWS CloudFormation vs RightScale vs Scalr

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Scalr
Scalr
Stacks51
Followers34
Votes26
RightScale
RightScale
Stacks19
Followers27
Votes0
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation
Stacks1.6K
Followers1.3K
Votes88

AWS CloudFormation vs RightScale vs Scalr: What are the differences?

  1. Infrastructure as Code Approach: AWS CloudFormation allows users to define their infrastructure in a template file using JSON or YAML, making it easier to manage and replicate infrastructure setups. On the other hand, RightScale and Scalr focus more on cloud management and automation, providing a platform for managing infrastructure across multiple clouds rather than utilizing a declarative template approach.

  2. Cloud Provider Support: AWS CloudFormation is specific to the Amazon Web Services ecosystem, offering deep integration with various AWS services. In contrast, RightScale and Scalr are cloud-agnostic platforms that support multiple cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, giving users more flexibility in choosing their cloud infrastructure.

  3. Automation Capabilities: When it comes to automation, AWS CloudFormation primarily focuses on infrastructure provisioning and configuration management. RightScale and Scalr, on the other hand, provide more advanced automation features like scaling, monitoring, and application lifecycle management, making them suitable for complex cloud environments.

  4. Cost Management: RightScale and Scalr offer cost management features such as cost tracking, optimization, and budgeting tools to help users monitor and control their cloud spending effectively. AWS CloudFormation, on the other hand, lacks these built-in cost management capabilities, requiring users to rely on third-party tools for cost optimization.

  5. Community Support and Marketplace: RightScale has a strong community presence, offering a marketplace where users can find pre-built templates, scripts, and configurations to simplify cloud management tasks. Scalr also provides a similar marketplace for sharing infrastructure blueprints. In comparison, AWS CloudFormation lacks a central marketplace for sharing templates and resources, relying more on manual sharing and community forums.

  6. Scalability and Flexibility: AWS CloudFormation is well-suited for managing resources within the AWS ecosystem and is highly scalable for complex infrastructures. RightScale and Scalr, with their multi-cloud support, offer more flexibility in choosing different cloud providers and scaling resources across diverse environments, making them a better choice for organizations seeking hybrid or multi-cloud solutions.

In Summary, AWS CloudFormation focuses on infrastructure as code within the AWS ecosystem, while RightScale and Scalr offer cloud-agnostic solutions with advanced automation and cost management features for comprehensive cloud management.

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Advice on Scalr, RightScale, AWS CloudFormation

Timothy
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
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
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

Scalr
Scalr
RightScale
RightScale
AWS CloudFormation
AWS CloudFormation

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

Automation is the core of RightScale, freeing you to run efficient, scalable, and highly-available applications. Our multi-cloud integration enables you to choose your own clouds, providing freedom to work with any vendor in a rapidly changing market. And rest assured knowing that you have visibility and control over all of your resources in one place. To take advantage of best practices, we encourage you to tap into cloud expertise provided by our service, support, and partner networks when building and managing your infrastructure.

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.

Shared State File Storage & Locking; Run Triggers; Terraform CLI Integration;Version Control Integration;Identity And Access Management;Policy As Code With Open Policy Agent;Modules;Template Registry;Webhooks;Cost Estimation
Supports: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Datapipe, Google Cloud Platform, HP Cloud, IDCF — Yahoo! Japan, Rackspace, SoftLayer, Windows Azure, CloudStack, OpenStack;Access, manage, and configure all of your resources — compute, networking, and storage — across all of your clouds.;See and manipulate all of your cloud servers in one place.;Configure your networking resources such as IP addresses, content delivery networks, firewalls, and virtual private networks. Manage block storage volumes and object stores to enable web serving, content delivery, persistent data storage, and backups.;Persistence in a non-persistent cloud;Tag and SSH into servers;Logically group servers together;Easily view complex environments;Cloud resources: Provision, configure, edit, and decommission.;Monitoring: Track and graph custom metrics in the dashboard or export to your own systems.;Auditing: Track and export audit logs.;Provisioning: Manage accounts, users, and permissions.;Build upon MultiCloud Images;Configure dynamically;Tune with input variables;Inherit preferences or set at launch;Store in your configuration library;Track and control versions;Find differences between configurations;Integrate with revision control systems;RightScale MultiCloud Marketplace offers pre-built cloud ServerTemplates, scripts, and architectures published by RightScale, our partners, and our users.;Keep tabs on your environment’s health with more than 80 built-in server, volume, database, and application monitors.;Create custom views on the Dashboard with QuickMonitoring and Widgets.;Manage an entire operations team with user authentication and permission controls. Assign roles by user and account to control administrative, billing, monitoring, publishing, and operational tasks.
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
51
Stacks
19
Stacks
1.6K
Followers
34
Followers
27
Followers
1.3K
Votes
26
Votes
0
Votes
88
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 5
    Image Builder
  • 3
    Auto Scaling
  • 3
    Open Source
  • 2
    Cost Analytics
  • 2
    Multi-Cloud Support
No community feedback yet
Pros
  • 43
    Automates infrastructure deployments
  • 21
    Declarative infrastructure and deployment
  • 13
    No more clicking around
  • 3
    Any Operative System you want
  • 3
    Infrastructure as code
Cons
  • 4
    Brittle
  • 2
    No RBAC and policies in templates
Integrations
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps
Terraform
Terraform
Bitbucket
Bitbucket
GitHub
GitHub
GitLab
GitLab
AppDynamics
AppDynamics
New Relic
New Relic
Papertrail
Papertrail
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Scalr, RightScale, AWS CloudFormation?

Packer

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.

Pulumi

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.

Morpheus

Morpheus

Morpheus is a cloud application management and orchestration platform that works on any cloud or infrastructure, from AWS to bare metal. Enjoy complete cloud freedom with Morpheus.

Azure Resource Manager

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

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

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

CopperEgg

CopperEgg

Continuous visibility and cloud monitoring for all your servers – hosted or private, Linux or Windows. Works great with Amazon EC2, Rackspace, or any public or private cloud.

Mist.io

Mist.io

Create, reboot or destroy virtual machines. View their metadata, tag and search them. Assign keys and send SSH commands through the web. Enable monitoring, alerting & automation. You'll know right away if anything goes wrong. You'll be able to address issues from anywhere, using your phone or tablet.

AWS Cloud Development Kit

AWS Cloud Development Kit

It is an open source software development framework to model and provision your cloud application resources using familiar programming languages. It uses the familiarity and expressive power of programming languages for modeling your applications. It provides you with high-level components that preconfigure cloud resources with proven defaults, so you can build cloud applications without needing to be an expert.

Yocto

Yocto

It is an open source collaboration project that helps developers create custom Linux-based systems regardless of the hardware architecture. It provides a flexible set of tools and a space where embedded developers worldwide can share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices that can be used to create tailored Linux images for embedded and IOT devices, or anywhere a customized Linux OS is needed.

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