Ansible vs Buildbot: What are the differences?
Ansible: Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine. 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; Buildbot: Python-based continuous integration testing framework. BuildBot is a system to automate the compile/test cycle required by most software projects to validate code changes. By automatically rebuilding and testing the tree each time something has changed, build problems are pinpointed quickly, before other developers are inconvenienced by the failure.
Ansible and Buildbot are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Continuous Integration" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Ansible are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Buildbot provides the following key features:
- run builds on a variety of slave platforms
- arbitrary build process: handles projects using C, Python, whatever
- minimal host requirements: Python and Twisted
"Agentless" is the primary reason why developers consider Ansible over the competitors, whereas "Highly configurable builds" was stated as the key factor in picking Buildbot.
Ansible and Buildbot are both open source tools. Ansible with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Buildbot with 4K GitHub stars and 1.37K GitHub forks.
DigitalOcean, 9GAG, and Rainist are some of the popular companies that use Ansible, whereas Buildbot is used by Mozilla, Animoto, and Fetch Robotics. Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 960 company stacks & 587 developers stacks; compared to Buildbot, which is listed in 7 company stacks and 6 developer stacks.
