Ansible vs Apache Mesos

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Ansible

19.1K
15.2K
+ 1
1.3K
Apache Mesos

310
419
+ 1
31
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Ansible vs Apache Mesos: What are the differences?

# Key Differences between Ansible and Apache Mesos

**1. Architecture**: Ansible is a configuration management tool that follows a master-slave architecture where the controlling machine communicates with remote nodes for automation tasks. On the other hand, Apache Mesos is a distributed systems kernel that uses a master-slave architecture for resource management and scheduling tasks across a cluster of machines.

**2. Use Case**: Ansible is used primarily for automating infrastructure configuration and application deployment, making it suitable for DevOps tasks. In contrast, Apache Mesos is designed for large-scale distributed applications and frameworks, providing resource sharing and isolation capabilities for containerized workloads.

**3. Scalability**: Ansible is more suitable for managing smaller to medium-sized infrastructures due to its agentless nature and limited scalability. Apache Mesos, on the other hand, is built for massive scalability, allowing it to manage thousands of nodes and support complex cloud-native applications effectively.

**4. Orchestration**: Ansible focuses on orchestration and automation of tasks, ensuring that configuration changes are applied consistently across multiple servers. In comparison, Apache Mesos offers advanced orchestration capabilities for managing the deployment and scaling of distributed applications in a cluster environment.

**5. Community Support**: Ansible has a large and active community with extensive documentation and modules for various technologies, making it easier for users to get started and troubleshoot issues. Apache Mesos also has a supportive community backing its development, but it targets a more specialized audience due to its focus on data center resource management.

**6. Extensibility**: Ansible can be easily extended through custom modules and plugins, allowing users to tailor the tool to their specific automation needs. Apache Mesos, on the other hand, provides a flexible framework for building distributed systems and supports various schedulers and container orchestration platforms for enhanced functionality.

In Summary, Ansible is ideal for automating infrastructure tasks and application deployments in small to medium-sized environments, while Apache Mesos excels in managing large-scale distributed applications with high scalability and advanced orchestration capabilities.
Advice on Ansible and Apache Mesos
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

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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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

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.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

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

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Pros of Ansible
Pros of Apache Mesos
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
  • 69
    Flexible
  • 55
    Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
  • 35
    Makes sense
  • 30
    Super efficient and flexible
  • 27
    Powerful
  • 11
    Dynamic Inventory
  • 9
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 6
    Cloud Oriented
  • 6
    Easy to maintain
  • 4
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 4
    Simple and powerful
  • 4
    Multi language
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Because SSH
  • 4
    Procedural or declarative, or both
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Consistency
  • 2
    Well-documented
  • 2
    Masterless
  • 2
    Debugging is simple
  • 2
    Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
  • 2
    Fast as hell
  • 1
    Manage any OS
  • 1
    Work on windows, but difficult to manage
  • 1
    Certified Content
  • 21
    Easy scaling
  • 6
    Web UI
  • 2
    Fault-Tolerant
  • 1
    Elastic Distributed System
  • 1
    High-Available

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Cons of Ansible
Cons of Apache Mesos
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 2
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 1
    Not for long term
  • 1
    Depends on Zookeeper

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What is Ansible?

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 Apache Mesos?

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers.

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What are some alternatives to Ansible and Apache Mesos?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
See all alternatives