Ansible vs Spinnaker

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Spinnaker

Stacks233

Followers358

Votes14

GitHub Stars9.6K

Forks1.2K

Ansible vs Spinnaker: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and Spinnaker are two popular tools used in the field of DevOps for automation and deployment purposes. While both tools are designed to simplify the deployment process, there are some key differences between Ansible and Spinnaker that make them suitable for different use cases.

Architecture: Ansible is an agentless tool that works by connecting to remote servers through SSH or WinRM. It uses a push-based model, where the control machine pushes the desired state to the target machines. On the other hand, Spinnaker follows a microservices architecture and operates on a pull-based model, where it continuously polls the target clusters to apply changes.
Deployment Strategy: Ansible focuses on executing tasks in an imperative manner, where the desired state is explicitly defined in the playbook. It allows for fine-grained control over the deployment process and is well-suited for complex configurations. Spinnaker, on the other hand, follows a declarative approach, where the desired state is defined using constructs like pipelines and stages. It simplifies the deployment process by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure details.
Scalability: Ansible can handle a large number of nodes, but it is limited by the resources of the control machine. Spinnaker, being a distributed tool, can scale horizontally by adding more instances of the microservices to handle deployment tasks. This makes it more suitable for large-scale deployments where high scalability is required.
Integration with Cloud Providers: Ansible provides a wide range of modules for integrating with different cloud providers, allowing users to manage infrastructure as code. It supports various cloud APIs and provides wrappers for popular cloud services. Spinnaker, on the other hand, natively integrates with several cloud providers and provides specialized deployment strategies for each one. It also offers features like automated rollbacks and canary deployments, which are specifically designed for cloud-native applications.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community, with a vast number of playbooks and roles available for various use cases. It has extensive documentation and is widely adopted in the industry. Spinnaker, although relatively newer compared to Ansible, also has a growing community and ecosystem. It is backed by major companies like Netflix and Google, which contribute actively to its development.
Use Cases: Ansible is best suited for infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and general-purpose automation tasks. It is well-suited for managing traditional IT infrastructure. Spinnaker, on the other hand, is specifically designed for continuous delivery and deployment of cloud-native applications. It provides advanced features like multi-cloud deployments and canary analysis, making it ideal for teams working with cloud platforms.

In Summary, Ansible and Spinnaker have different architectures, deployment strategies, scalability, integration with cloud providers, community support, and use cases. While Ansible focuses on infrastructure automation and management, Spinnaker is designed for continuous delivery and deployment of cloud-native applications.

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Advice on Ansible, Spinnaker

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	Spinnaker
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.	Created at Netflix, it has been battle-tested in production by hundreds of teams over millions of deployments. It combines a powerful and flexible pipeline management system with integrations to the major cloud providers.
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 9.6K
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 1.2K
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 233
Followers 15.6K	Followers 358
Votes 1.3K	Votes 14
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 14 Mature Cons 3 No GitOps 1 Management overhead 1 Configuration time 1 Ease of use
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Stackdriver Packer Prometheus Chef Jenkins Docker Puppet Labs Amazon EC2 GitHub Google Kubernetes Engine

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Spinnaker?

Buddy

Git platform for web and software developers with Docker-based tools for Continuous Integration and Deployment.

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.

Cloud 66

Cloud 66 gives you everything you need to build, deploy and maintain your applications on any cloud, without the headache of dealing with "server stuff". Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Jamstack, Laravel, GoLang, and 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.

DeployBot

DeployBot makes it simple to deploy your work anywhere. You can compile or process your code in a Docker container on our infrastructure, and we'll copy it to your servers once everything has been successfully built.

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

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Spinnaker: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: Ansible is an agentless tool that works by connecting to remote servers through SSH or WinRM. It uses a push-based model, where the control machine pushes the desired state to the target machines. On the other hand, Spinnaker follows a microservices architecture and operates on a pull-based model, where it continuously polls the target clusters to apply changes.
Deployment Strategy: Ansible focuses on executing tasks in an imperative manner, where the desired state is explicitly defined in the playbook. It allows for fine-grained control over the deployment process and is well-suited for complex configurations. Spinnaker, on the other hand, follows a declarative approach, where the desired state is defined using constructs like pipelines and stages. It simplifies the deployment process by abstracting away the underlying infrastructure details.
Scalability: Ansible can handle a large number of nodes, but it is limited by the resources of the control machine. Spinnaker, being a distributed tool, can scale horizontally by adding more instances of the microservices to handle deployment tasks. This makes it more suitable for large-scale deployments where high scalability is required.
Integration with Cloud Providers: Ansible provides a wide range of modules for integrating with different cloud providers, allowing users to manage infrastructure as code. It supports various cloud APIs and provides wrappers for popular cloud services. Spinnaker, on the other hand, natively integrates with several cloud providers and provides specialized deployment strategies for each one. It also offers features like automated rollbacks and canary deployments, which are specifically designed for cloud-native applications.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community, with a vast number of playbooks and roles available for various use cases. It has extensive documentation and is widely adopted in the industry. Spinnaker, although relatively newer compared to Ansible, also has a growing community and ecosystem. It is backed by major companies like Netflix and Google, which contribute actively to its development.
Use Cases: Ansible is best suited for infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and general-purpose automation tasks. It is well-suited for managing traditional IT infrastructure. Spinnaker, on the other hand, is specifically designed for continuous delivery and deployment of cloud-native applications. It provides advanced features like multi-cloud deployments and canary analysis, making it ideal for teams working with cloud platforms.

Ansible vs Spinnaker

Overview

Ansible vs Spinnaker: What are the differences?