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AWS OpsWorks vs Ansible: What are the differences?
Key Differences between AWS OpsWorks and Ansible
1. Platform Compatibility:
AWS OpsWorks is a fully managed service that operates in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) ecosystem. It offers seamless integration and compatibility with other AWS services such as EC2, RDS, and Elastic Load Balancer. On the other hand, Ansible is an open-source automation tool that can be used across multiple platforms including cloud providers like AWS as well as on-premises environments. This makes Ansible more flexible and adaptable for diverse infrastructure setups.
2. Infrastructure Provisioning and Configuration:
OpsWorks provides a higher level of abstraction by offering built-in management functionality for the entire infrastructure stack. With OpsWorks, users can define the specifications of their applications and OpsWorks handles the provisioning and configuration of the underlying infrastructure automatically. In contrast, Ansible is focused on configuration management. It allows users to define and automate the desired state of their infrastructure, but it does not provide native provisioning capabilities. Users need to rely on other tools or manual methods for provisioning the infrastructure.
3. Learning Curve and Ease of Use:
OpsWorks offers a user-friendly interface and graphical console that simplifies the setup and management of applications and infrastructure. It provides predefined deployment stacks and layers, making it easier for users to get started. Ansible, however, has a steeper learning curve as it requires users to learn its domain-specific language (DSL) and YAML syntax for writing playbooks. While Ansible allows for more fine-grained control and customization, it might require more effort and expertise to set up and operate effectively.
4. Scalability and Auto Scaling:
OpsWorks comes with built-in support for auto scaling, allowing users to automatically adjust the number of instances in response to changes in demand. It integrates with AWS Auto Scaling and offers predefined scaling policies. This makes it easy to scale applications in the AWS environment. Ansible, on the other hand, does not provide native auto scaling capabilities. Users need to manually configure and manage auto scaling solutions themselves, which might require additional tools and expertise.
5. Integration with Third-Party Tools:
OpsWorks provides seamless integration with other AWS services like CloudWatch for monitoring, Elastic Load Balancer for load balancing, and RDS for database management. It also supports integration with custom Chef recipes and cookbooks. Ansible, being an open-source tool, can integrate with a wide range of third-party tools and services through its extensive library of modules. It can be easily integrated with tools like Jenkins for continuous integration and delivery, and various monitoring and logging systems.
6. Licensing and Cost:
OpsWorks is a managed service provided by AWS and is billed based on the resources used, such as the number of instances and load balancers. It is a pay-as-you-go model, so the cost scales with the size of the infrastructure. Ansible, on the other hand, is an open-source tool and is free to use. There are no licensing costs associated with Ansible, although users might incur costs for hosting and managing their infrastructure.
In Summary, AWS OpsWorks is an AWS-native managed service that offers platform compatibility, built-in infrastructure provisioning, scalability features, and easy integration with other AWS services. Ansible, on the other hand, is an open-source automation tool with a wider platform compatibility, a focus on configuration management, extensive integration capabilities, and lower cost due to its open-source nature.
We have a lot of operations running using Rundeck (including deployments) and we also have various roles created in Ansible for infrastructure creation, which we execute using Rundeck. Rundeck we are using a community edition. Since we are already using Rundeck for executing the Ansible role, need an advice. What difference will it make if we replace Rundeck with Ansible Tower? Advantages and Disadvantages? We are using Jenkins to call Rundeck Job, same will be used for Ansible Tower if we replace Rundeck.
I never use Tower, but I can recommend Ansible Semaphore as alternative to Rundeck. It is lightweight, easy to use and tailored for work with Ansible.
Personal Dotfiles management
Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.
Ideally, I reckon, it should:
- be containerized (Docker?)
- be versionable (Git)
- ensure idempotency
- allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
- be fully recoverable (Linux/ macOS)
- be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)
Does it make sense?
I recommend whatever you are most comfortable with/whatever might already be installed in the system. Note that, for personal dotfiles, it does not need to be containerized or have full automation/testing. It just needs to handle multiple OS and platform and be idempotent. Git will handle the heavy lifting. Note that you'll have to separate out certain files like the private SSH keys and write your CM so that it will pull it from another store or assist in manually importing them.
I personally use Ansible since it is a serverless design and is in Python, which I prefer to Ruby. Saltstack was too new when I started to port my dotfile management scripts from shell into a configuration management tool. I think any of the above is fine.
You should check out SaltStack. It's a lot more powerful than Puppet, Chef, & Ansible. If not Salt, then I would go Ansible. But stay away from Puppet & Chef. 10+ year user of Puppet, and 2+ year user of Chef.
Chef is a definite no-go for me. I learned it the hard way (ie. got a few tasks in a prod system) and it took quite a lot to grasp it on an acceptable level. Ansible in turn is much more straightforward and much easier to test.
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.
I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Terraform provides a cloud-provider agnostic way of provisioning cloud infrastructure while AWS CloudFormation is limited to AWS.
Pulumi is a great tool that provides similar features as Terraform, including advanced features like policy and cost management.
We see that Terraform has great support in the cloud community. For most cloud services we use, there is an official Terraform provider. We also believe in the declarative model of HCL, which is why we chose Terraform over Pulumi. However, we still keep an eye on Pulumi's progress.
Ansible is great for provisioning software and configuration within virtual machines, but we don't think that Ansible is the right tool for provisioning cloud infrastructure since it's built around the assumption that there is an inventory of remote machines. Terraform also supports more services that we use than Ansible.