When I first saw the Design Canvas I thought it was brilliant. But as time goes on I find I'm replacing more and more of its functionality with XaaS services. For example:
We are using an NSX Universal Transport Zone so cant use it for firewall rules via the Service Composer
We need the ability to deploy HA Load Balancers so cant use it for On-Demand Load Balancers
I can't bind an action-generated field in the VM to a field in the deployment so will need to deploy via a single XaaS form.
We are deploying fairly controlled applications with a repeatable pattern so if using multi-machine blueprints we typically end up with a blueprint per-application and per reservation (prod, pre=prod etc) to set the networks, so the blueprint sprawl could be huge. I wanted to use Application Services to deploy applciations but it seems this can only be done at deployment time so again requires separate blueprints for each application, and wont allow us to use generic 3-tier application stack blueprints. I think its useful for devops teams to quickly put together a blueprint which will be used for non-prod test environments but that's about it. Interested to hear ways other people are using them, and whether I am missing something
