profile for Gajendra D Ambi on Stack Exchange, a network of free, community-driven Q&A sites

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Ansible or Chef ? and Why?

First of all why do you need anything like ansible/chef/puppet/salt which can mainly be classified as configuration management and automation tools.
These are today's devops needs of an IT firm. You want to deploy, configure or manage the configuration of many machines across different platforms (local or cloud) then you need one.
So you have 2 types of CMT (configuration management tools).

ANSIBLE
========

  1. You want/need it to be agentless
    So if your targets are majorly devices and not operating systems or applications then you need this. If you are managing hardware routers , switches or devices where you can have an SSH connection but you cannot install any specific package in it to manage. You can't install your own package or an agent into a cisco nexus switch or any other switch of any other company. The vendors usually have a strict lock on what can be installed on these devices for security reasons. Ansible is most and best known for network automation for this same reason.
  2. Most of your infrastructure is mainly opensource/linux based.
    All ansible requires is SSH and linux systems are mainly managed via ssh.
  3. You like bash or python
    Ansible uses python and python 2.x is present by default on your gnu/linux machines.
  4. You are adventurous and do not mind coming up with your modules (write your own playbook)

CHEF
=====
  1. The need of an agent being present at the target machine/component to be managed isn't a bother.
  2. you want to manage windows, linux, mac seamlessly
  3. you like/know ruby more than you bash/shell/python
  4. you need a more mature product and better documentation
  5. Larger community (which translates to having more ready made modules available for common IT configuration management)
Currently I am fiddling with chef and I am digging it.

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