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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Advice on Ansible and Spinnaker
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 Spinnaker
  • 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
  • 14
    Mature

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Cons of Ansible
Cons of Spinnaker
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 2
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 3
    No GitOps
  • 1
    Configuration time
  • 1
    Management overhead
  • 1
    Ease of use

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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 Spinnaker?

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.

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What are some alternatives to Ansible and Spinnaker?
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