Ansible vs Conan

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Conan

Stacks84

Followers108

Votes10

GitHub Stars9.0K

Forks1.1K

Ansible vs Conan: What are the differences?

Ansible and Conan are both popular tools in the field of software development and deployment. While they have some similarities, there are several key differences between the two.

Integration vs Dependency Management: Ansible is primarily an automation tool that focuses on managing and orchestrating IT infrastructure and application deployment processes. It is used for tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and cloud provisioning. On the other hand, Conan is a dependency and package manager that is specifically designed for C and C++ projects. It helps in managing the dependencies of projects and enables easy sharing and reuse of libraries.
Domain-specific vs General-purpose: Ansible is a general-purpose automation tool that can be used in various domains such as IT operations, system administration, and DevOps. It provides a wide range of functionalities and can be extended to support different use cases. Conan, on the other hand, is domain-specific and focused on solving the specific problem of dependency management in C and C++ projects. It provides specialized features and workflows tailored to the needs of the C and C++ development community.
Configuration Management vs Package Management: Ansible's core functionality lies in configuration management, where it allows users to define and enforce the desired state of systems and applications. It provides tools for managing system configurations, application deployments, and service orchestration. Conan, on the other hand, is primarily a package management tool that focuses on resolving and managing dependencies for C and C++ projects. It provides features for package creation, versioning, and distribution.
Agentless vs Agent-based: Ansible operates in an agentless manner, where it uses SSH and other remote management protocols to connect to and control target systems. This makes it lightweight and easy to set up, as no additional software needs to be installed on the target systems. Conan, on the other hand, requires a Conan client to be installed on the developer's machine to manage dependencies. This client communicates with the Conan server to resolve and fetch the required packages.
Procedural vs Declarative: Ansible follows a procedural approach, where tasks are executed step-by-step in a predefined order. Users define the specific steps and actions to be taken to achieve the desired state of systems and applications. Conan, on the other hand, follows a declarative approach, where users define the desired state of the system or project, and Conan automatically resolves and manages the required dependencies to achieve that state.
Language Support: Ansible supports a wide range of programming languages and technologies, including Python, Ruby, Java, and more. It provides modules and plugins to interact with various systems and services. Conan, on the other hand, is specifically designed for C and C++ projects and provides support for managing dependencies for these languages. It integrates well with build systems like CMake and provides features like recipe generation and package export.

In Summary, Ansible is a general-purpose automation tool focused on configuration management, while Conan is a domain-specific package manager for C and C++ projects. Ansible operates in an agentless, procedural manner and supports a wide range of technologies, while Conan requires a client installation, follows a declarative approach, and is tailored for C and C++ dependency management.

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Advice on Ansible, Conan

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	Conan
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.	Install or build your own packages for any platform. Conan also allows you to run your own server easily from the command line.
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.	Dependencies and package management for developers; De-centralized; Source code and binaries; Full open-source stack; Simple, flexible and powerful scripting; Full control of dependencies; Free hosting service for free software;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars 9.0K
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 1.1K
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 84
Followers 15.6K	Followers 108
Votes 1.3K	Votes 10
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility	Pros 4 Crossplatform builds 3 Easy to maintain used dependencies 2 Build recipes can be very flexble 1 Integrations with cmake, qmake and other build systems Cons 1 3rd party recipes can be flawed
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	C lang C++

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Conan?

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

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 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 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 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.

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.

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

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Conan: What are the differences?

Ansible and Conan are both popular tools in the field of software development and deployment. While they have some similarities, there are several key differences between the two.

Integration vs Dependency Management: Ansible is primarily an automation tool that focuses on managing and orchestrating IT infrastructure and application deployment processes. It is used for tasks such as configuration management, application deployment, and cloud provisioning. On the other hand, Conan is a dependency and package manager that is specifically designed for C and C++ projects. It helps in managing the dependencies of projects and enables easy sharing and reuse of libraries.
Domain-specific vs General-purpose: Ansible is a general-purpose automation tool that can be used in various domains such as IT operations, system administration, and DevOps. It provides a wide range of functionalities and can be extended to support different use cases. Conan, on the other hand, is domain-specific and focused on solving the specific problem of dependency management in C and C++ projects. It provides specialized features and workflows tailored to the needs of the C and C++ development community.
Configuration Management vs Package Management: Ansible's core functionality lies in configuration management, where it allows users to define and enforce the desired state of systems and applications. It provides tools for managing system configurations, application deployments, and service orchestration. Conan, on the other hand, is primarily a package management tool that focuses on resolving and managing dependencies for C and C++ projects. It provides features for package creation, versioning, and distribution.
Agentless vs Agent-based: Ansible operates in an agentless manner, where it uses SSH and other remote management protocols to connect to and control target systems. This makes it lightweight and easy to set up, as no additional software needs to be installed on the target systems. Conan, on the other hand, requires a Conan client to be installed on the developer's machine to manage dependencies. This client communicates with the Conan server to resolve and fetch the required packages.
Procedural vs Declarative: Ansible follows a procedural approach, where tasks are executed step-by-step in a predefined order. Users define the specific steps and actions to be taken to achieve the desired state of systems and applications. Conan, on the other hand, follows a declarative approach, where users define the desired state of the system or project, and Conan automatically resolves and manages the required dependencies to achieve that state.
Language Support: Ansible supports a wide range of programming languages and technologies, including Python, Ruby, Java, and more. It provides modules and plugins to interact with various systems and services. Conan, on the other hand, is specifically designed for C and C++ projects and provides support for managing dependencies for these languages. It integrates well with build systems like CMake and provides features like recipe generation and package export.

Ansible vs Conan

Overview