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Ansible vs Chef vs Terraform: What are the differences?
Introduction: Ansible, Chef, and Terraform are popular tools used in the field of IT automation and infrastructure management. While they all serve a similar purpose, there are key differences that set them apart from each other.
Ease of Use: Ansible stands out in terms of simplicity and ease of use. It relies on a YAML-based configuration file that is easy to understand and write. Chef, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve as it uses a domain-specific language (DSL) called Ruby, which requires knowledge of programming concepts. Terraform falls between the two, as it requires understanding of its HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), but it also offers a straightforward approach for provisioning infrastructure.
Configuration Management vs. Orchestration: Chef focuses primarily on configuration management. It is designed to ensure that a host's desired state is maintained accurately by configuring and managing various resources. Ansible, on the other hand, is more focused on orchestration and aims to automate tasks at a higher level, allowing users to define playbooks and execute them across multiple hosts simultaneously. Terraform primarily focuses on provisioning infrastructure and managing cloud resources without delving deeply into configuration management.
Agent-Based vs. Agentless: Chef and Terraform both rely on agents (or agent-like components) that need to be installed on the target systems to execute configuration or provisioning tasks. Ansible, however, follows an agentless approach by using SSH or PowerShell remoting to remotely manage and control the target systems. This makes Ansible easier to install and maintain, as it does not require any agents to be deployed.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and vibrant community, with numerous pre-built modules available, making it easier to automate various tasks. Chef also has a strong community and offers a vast number of community-contributed cookbooks to extend its functionality. Terraform, while relatively newer, has gained significant popularity due to its community-driven efforts and extensive provider ecosystem, allowing integration with various cloud providers.
State Management: Ansible operates in a stateless manner, with each task being idempotent and solely responsible for achieving the desired state. This means that each time Ansible is run, it ensures that the system is in the desired state without keeping track of previous states. Chef uses a convergent model, where it continuously inspects and takes action based on the system's current state, making it suitable for managing systems that need constant drift detection and repair. Terraform follows a declarative approach, maintaining a state file that tracks the resources it creates, updates, or destroys, providing a record of the infrastructure's state.
In Summary, Ansible focuses on simplicity and orchestration, with an agentless architecture and a large community, while Chef specializes in configuration management with a convergent model and a strong community, and Terraform emphasizes infrastructure provisioning with a declarative approach and a growing ecosystem.
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
Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
I personally am not a huge fan of vendor lock in for multiple reasons:
- I've seen cost saving moves to the cloud end up costing a fortune and trapping companies due to over utilization of cloud specific features.
- I've seen S3 failures nearly take down half the internet.
- I've seen companies get stuck in the cloud because they aren't built cloud agnostic.
I choose to use terraform for my cloud provisioning for these reasons:
- It's cloud agnostic so I can use it no matter where I am.
- It isn't difficult to use and uses a relatively easy to read language.
- It tests infrastructure before running it, and enables me to see and keep changes up to date.
- It runs from the same CLI I do most of my CM work from.
Context: I wanted to create an end to end IoT data pipeline simulation in Google Cloud IoT Core and other GCP services. I never touched Terraform meaningfully until working on this project, and it's one of the best explorations in my development career. The documentation and syntax is incredibly human-readable and friendly. I'm used to building infrastructure through the google apis via Python , but I'm so glad past Sung did not make that decision. I was tempted to use Google Cloud Deployment Manager, but the templates were a bit convoluted by first impression. I'm glad past Sung did not make this decision either.
Solution: Leveraging Google Cloud Build Google Cloud Run Google Cloud Bigtable Google BigQuery Google Cloud Storage Google Compute Engine along with some other fun tools, I can deploy over 40 GCP resources using Terraform!
Check Out My Architecture: CLICK ME
Check out the GitHub repo attached
Pros of Ansible
- Agentless284
- Great configuration210
- Simple199
- Powerful176
- Easy to learn155
- Flexible69
- Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done55
- Makes sense35
- Super efficient and flexible30
- Powerful27
- Dynamic Inventory11
- Backed by Red Hat9
- Works with AWS7
- Cloud Oriented6
- Easy to maintain6
- Vagrant provisioner4
- Simple and powerful4
- Multi language4
- Simple4
- Because SSH4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Easy4
- Consistency3
- Well-documented2
- Masterless2
- Debugging is simple2
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Fast as hell2
- Manage any OS1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
- Certified Content1
Pros of Chef
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration110
- Reusable components76
- Integration testing with Vagrant47
- Repeatable43
- Mock testing with Chefspec30
- Ruby14
- Can package cookbooks to guarantee repeatability8
- Works with AWS7
- Has marketplace where you get readymade cookbooks3
- Matured product with good community support3
- Less declarative more procedural2
- Open source configuration mgmt made easy(ish)2
Pros of Terraform
- Infrastructure as code122
- Declarative syntax73
- Planning45
- Simple28
- Parallelism24
- Well-documented8
- Cloud agnostic8
- It's like coding your infrastructure in simple English6
- Immutable infrastructure6
- Platform agnostic5
- Extendable4
- Automation4
- Automates infrastructure deployments4
- Portability4
- Lightweight2
- Scales to hundreds of hosts2
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Chef
Cons of Terraform
- Doesn't have full support to GKE1
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