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Puppet Labs vs Vagrant: What are the differences?
Puppet Labs: Server automation framework and application. 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; Vagrant: A tool for building and distributing development environments. Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
Puppet Labs and Vagrant are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Virtual Machine Management" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Puppet Labs are:
- Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.
- Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.
- Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.
On the other hand, Vagrant provides the following key features:
- Boxes
- Up And SSH
- Synced Folders
"Devops" is the top reason why over 45 developers like Puppet Labs, while over 354 developers mention "Development environments" as the leading cause for choosing Vagrant.
Puppet Labs and Vagrant are both open source tools. It seems that Vagrant with 18.6K GitHub stars and 3.74K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Puppet Labs with 5.37K GitHub stars and 2.1K GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Vagrant has a broader approval, being mentioned in 802 company stacks & 479 developers stacks; compared to Puppet Labs, which is listed in 180 company stacks and 49 developer stacks.
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.
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.
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
Pros of Puppet Labs
- Devops52
- Automate it44
- Reusable components26
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration21
- Great community18
- Very scalable12
- Cloud management12
- Easy to maintain10
- Free tier9
- Works with Amazon EC26
- Declarative4
- Ruby4
- Works with Azure3
- Works with OpenStack3
- Nginx2
- Ease of use1
Pros of Vagrant
- Development environments352
- Simple bootstraping290
- Free237
- Boxes139
- Provisioning130
- Portable84
- Synced folders81
- Reproducible69
- Ssh51
- Very flexible44
- Works well, can be replicated easily with other devs5
- Easy-to-share, easy-to-version dev configuration5
- Great3
- Just works3
- Quick way to get running2
- DRY - "Do Not Repeat Yourself"1
- Container Friendly1
- What is vagrant?1
- Good documentation1
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Cons of Puppet Labs
- Steep learning curve3
- Customs types idempotence1
Cons of Vagrant
- Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.)2
- Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space2
- Development environment that kills your battery1
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