Devops Online Training from India

What is the Difference Chef Vs Ansible Vs Puppet:

Usually called IT automation tools, these three tools are generally used for configuration management, used vastly for deploying, configuring and managing servers. Even though these tools are really simple and easy to use, they function by automating even the complex multi-tier IT environments, that is why they are called simple yet powerful automation tools. Let us just go through each one of it to find the differences:

Metrics

Chef

Puppet

Ansible

Availability

Yes

Yes

Yes

Ease of Setup

Complicated

Complicated

Easy & Simple

Management

Not so user friendly

Not so user friendly

User-friendly

Scalability

Highly Scalable

Highly Scalable

Highly Scalable

Configuration Language

DSL (Ruby)

DSL (Puppet DSL)

YAML (Python)

Inter-operability

High

High

High

Pricing (Upto 100 nodes)

$13700

$11200-$19900

$10000

Source: https://goo.gl/G3Wmzp

There are many factors which define the advantages and disadvantages of each one of the tool and we will go through them in detail here:

Availability: Even though all the tools are highly available, Chef, Puppet & Ansible, it depends on their multiple servers or instances that are present. This means, if the main server goes down, a backup or master server will always be there. For example:

Chef: In case of a failure of main server which is usually called chef server or primary server, there is always a backup server to take its place and make sure to run continuously.

Puppet: In this, it is called multi master architecture where in if the active or working master goes down, another master (even this is primary) will take its place.

Ansible: It runs on primary instance with only one active nod. Primary’s place is always taken by secondary as and when primary goes down.

Management: When we talk about management of these tools, we need to talk about the configurations as well. Two types of configurations, Pull & Push. In push, all configurations present in central server will be pushed to nodes and in pull, the slave nodes will automatically pull the configurations from central server without any commands. So basically Chef & Puppet follow Push configuration & Ansible follows Pull configuration.

Scalability: As mentioned all these three tools are highly scalable. These tools can configure on the successive days any number of nodes, either it be 50 or 500. They are so powerful and has a potential to handle larger infrastructures with just a specification of IP address and hostnames of the nodes.

Inter-operability: Even though for all these tools, main server (master server) which is generally called control machine runs on Linux/Unix, this is different for their slave nodes which are usually on windows.