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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Ansible vs fabric8

Ansible vs fabric8

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K
fabric8
fabric8
Stacks37
Followers113
Votes1
GitHub Stars1.8K
Forks498

Ansible vs fabric8: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is fabric8? Open source microservices platform based on Docker, Kubernetes and Jenkins. fabric8 makes it easy to create microservices, build, test and deploy them via Continuous Delivery pipelines then run and manage them with Continuous Improvement and ChatOps.

Ansible belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while fabric8 can be primarily classified under "Microservices Tools".

Ansible and fabric8 are both open source tools. Ansible with 37.8K GitHub stars and 15.8K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than fabric8 with 1.75K GitHub stars and 530 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Ansible, fabric8

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
fabric8
fabric8

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.

fabric8 makes it easy to create microservices, build, test and deploy them via Continuous Delivery pipelines then run and manage them with Continuous Improvement and ChatOps.

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.
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Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
1.8K
GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
498
Stacks
19.5K
Stacks
37
Followers
15.6K
Followers
113
Votes
1.3K
Votes
1
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
    Backward compatibility
  • 3
    Bloated
Pros
  • 1
    Easy to build and automate integration testing
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
Docker
Docker
Kubernetes
Kubernetes
Jenkins
Jenkins

What are some alternatives to Ansible, fabric8?

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.

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.

Istio

Istio

Istio is an open platform for providing a uniform way to integrate microservices, manage traffic flow across microservices, enforce policies and aggregate telemetry data. Istio's control plane provides an abstraction layer over the underlying cluster management platform, such as Kubernetes, Mesos, etc.

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

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric

Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices. Service Fabric addresses the significant challenges in developing and managing cloud apps.

Moleculer

Moleculer

It is a fault tolerant framework. It has built-in load balancer, circuit breaker, retries, timeout and bulkhead features. It is open source and free of charge project.

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