Ansible vs Helm

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Helm

Stacks1.4K

Followers911

Votes18

Ansible vs Helm: What are the differences?

Ansible is a general-purpose automation tool for configuration management, while Helm is specialized for managing applications on Kubernetes. Let's discuss the key differences between them:

Use Case and Scope: Ansible is a configuration management and automation tool that focuses on orchestrating and automating tasks across servers. It is not specific to container orchestration but is versatile for managing infrastructure and application configurations. Helm, on the other hand, is a package manager for Kubernetes applications. It simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications by packaging applications into charts, which are shareable and versioned.
Abstraction Level: Ansible operates at a higher level of abstraction, allowing you to define infrastructure and configuration in a more declarative manner using YAML files. It is not tied to a specific technology stack. Helm operates at a lower level, focusing specifically on Kubernetes and providing a way to define, install, and upgrade even complex Kubernetes applications using charts.
Configuration Language: Ansible uses YAML for configuration, making it human-readable and easy to write. It follows a task-oriented approach, defining what tasks need to be executed on the target systems. Helm uses a templating engine and YAML for defining Kubernetes manifests within charts. It allows parameterization and reuse of manifest files.
State Management: Ansible is idempotent, meaning you can run the same playbook multiple times, and it will bring the system to the desired state without causing unexpected changes. Helm is focused on managing Kubernetes application releases, and it tracks the state of releases, making it easy to upgrade or rollback changes to an application.
Ecosystem and Community: Ansible has a broad ecosystem beyond Kubernetes, with modules available for managing various infrastructure components, cloud providers, and applications. Helm is tightly integrated with the Kubernetes ecosystem and is widely adopted within the Kubernetes community for managing applications.
Updates and Rollbacks: Ansible updates configurations on servers by applying changes. Rollbacks might involve reapplying a previous configuration. Helm manages updates and rollbacks specifically for Kubernetes applications, allowing you to upgrade or roll back releases of applications deployed on Kubernetes.

In summary, Ansible is a versatile configuration management and automation tool that supports infrastructure provisioning, while Helm is specialized for managing applications on Kubernetes clusters. Ansible focuses on simplicity and cross-platform compatibility, whereas Helm leverages Kubernetes' ecosystem and built-in features for application deployment and management.

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Advice on Ansible, Helm

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	Helm
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.	Helm is the best way to find, share, and use software built for Kubernetes.
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.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 1.4K
Followers 15.6K	Followers 911
Votes 1.3K	Votes 18
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Bloated 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Backward compatibility	Pros 8 Infrastructure as code 6 Open source 2 Easy setup 1 Support 1 Testability and reproducibility
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Docker Kubernetes

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Helm?

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 Helm: What are the differences?

Ansible is a general-purpose automation tool for configuration management, while Helm is specialized for managing applications on Kubernetes. Let's discuss the key differences between them:

Use Case and Scope: Ansible is a configuration management and automation tool that focuses on orchestrating and automating tasks across servers. It is not specific to container orchestration but is versatile for managing infrastructure and application configurations. Helm, on the other hand, is a package manager for Kubernetes applications. It simplifies the deployment and management of Kubernetes applications by packaging applications into charts, which are shareable and versioned.
Abstraction Level: Ansible operates at a higher level of abstraction, allowing you to define infrastructure and configuration in a more declarative manner using YAML files. It is not tied to a specific technology stack. Helm operates at a lower level, focusing specifically on Kubernetes and providing a way to define, install, and upgrade even complex Kubernetes applications using charts.
Configuration Language: Ansible uses YAML for configuration, making it human-readable and easy to write. It follows a task-oriented approach, defining what tasks need to be executed on the target systems. Helm uses a templating engine and YAML for defining Kubernetes manifests within charts. It allows parameterization and reuse of manifest files.
State Management: Ansible is idempotent, meaning you can run the same playbook multiple times, and it will bring the system to the desired state without causing unexpected changes. Helm is focused on managing Kubernetes application releases, and it tracks the state of releases, making it easy to upgrade or rollback changes to an application.
Ecosystem and Community: Ansible has a broad ecosystem beyond Kubernetes, with modules available for managing various infrastructure components, cloud providers, and applications. Helm is tightly integrated with the Kubernetes ecosystem and is widely adopted within the Kubernetes community for managing applications.
Updates and Rollbacks: Ansible updates configurations on servers by applying changes. Rollbacks might involve reapplying a previous configuration. Helm manages updates and rollbacks specifically for Kubernetes applications, allowing you to upgrade or roll back releases of applications deployed on Kubernetes.

Ansible vs Helm

Overview