StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. AWS CodePipeline vs Ansible

AWS CodePipeline vs Ansible

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodePipeline
Stacks551
Followers933
Votes30

AWS CodePipeline vs Ansible: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare AWS CodePipeline and Ansible, two popular tools in the field of DevOps, and highlight their key differences.

  1. Scalability: AWS CodePipeline is a fully managed service that can scale to handle large-scale deployments in a distributed environment. It leverages the extensive infrastructure of AWS to provide an elastic and scalable solution. On the other hand, Ansible is an agentless tool that relies on the resources of the host machine, making it suitable for smaller deployments or environments with limited resources.

  2. Flexibility: AWS CodePipeline is tightly integrated with other AWS services, providing seamless integration and easy management of the entire software release process within the AWS ecosystem. It offers a wide range of pre-built integrations with various AWS services and third-party tools. Ansible, on the other hand, is a flexible tool that can be used with any infrastructure, not limited to AWS. It offers a broad set of modules and plays well with different platforms, making it platform-agnostic.

  3. Complexity: AWS CodePipeline abstracts much of the underlying complexity of the deployment process by providing a simple and visual interface for configuring the release pipeline. It incorporates all the necessary stages and actions required for continuous delivery, such as build, test, and deployment. Ansible, on the other hand, requires more manual configuration and scripting to define the deployment process. While it provides comprehensive control and customization, it can involve a steeper learning curve and more effort to set up initially.

  4. Automation: AWS CodePipeline is designed primarily for continuous delivery and automation of software releases. It provides a seamless integration with other AWS services, allowing for automated deployments and updates. Ansible, while also capable of automation, is a more general-purpose IT automation tool that can be used for various tasks beyond software deployment. It provides a wide range of modules and features for infrastructure automation, configuration management, and more.

  5. Cost: AWS CodePipeline is a managed service offered by AWS, which means it requires a subscription and incurs costs based on usage and the resources used. The cost can vary depending on factors such as pipeline complexity and the number of monthly active pipelines. Ansible, on the other hand, is an open-source tool that is free to use. While it may require resources to host and manage, there are no subscription fees or direct costs associated with using Ansible.

  6. Community and Support: AWS CodePipeline is backed by the extensive resources and support of AWS, which includes documentation, forums, and professional support services. It benefits from a large and active community of users and developers. Ansible, being an open-source tool, also has a vibrant community and provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and user forums. However, professional support options may vary depending on the support agreements offered by different vendors.

In summary, AWS CodePipeline is a scalable and tightly integrated service within the AWS ecosystem, providing a simplified deployment process. Ansible, on the other hand, offers flexibility, platform-agnostic capabilities, and extensive customization options, making it suitable for various infrastructure setups and automation tasks.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Ansible, AWS CodePipeline

Anonymous
Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

329k views329k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ansible
Ansible
AWS CodePipeline
AWS CodePipeline

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

CodePipeline builds, tests, and deploys your code every time there is a code change, based on the release process models you define.

Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.
Workflow Modeling;AWS Integrations;Pre-Built Plugins;Custom Plugins;Declarative Templates;Access Control
Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
19.5K
Stacks
551
Followers
15.6K
Followers
933
Votes
1.3K
Votes
30
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
Pros
  • 13
    Simple to set up
  • 8
    Managed service
  • 4
    GitHub integration
  • 3
    Parallel Execution
  • 2
    Automatic deployment
Cons
  • 2
    No project boards
  • 1
    No integration with "Power" 365 tools
Integrations
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Runscope
Runscope
Amazon S3
Amazon S3
GitHub
GitHub
Jenkins
Jenkins
CloudBees
CloudBees
BlazeMeter
BlazeMeter
Ghost Inspector
Ghost Inspector
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Ansible, AWS CodePipeline?

Buddy

Buddy

Git platform for web and software developers with Docker-based tools for Continuous Integration and Deployment.

Chef

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and more.

Fabric

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

DeployBot

DeployBot

DeployBot makes it simple to deploy your work anywhere. You can compile or process your code in a Docker container on our infrastructure, and we'll copy it to your servers once everything has been successfully built.

AWS OpsWorks

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana