Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. SaltStack

1

Puppet Enterprise

This open source configuration management solution is built with Ruby and offers custom Domain Specific Language (DSL) and Embedded Ruby (ERB) templates to create custom Puppet language files, and offers a declarative paradigm programming approach. Puppet uses an agent/master architecture—Agents manage nodes and request relevant info from masters that control configuration info. The agent polls status reports and queries regarding its associated server machine from the master Puppet server, which then communicates its response and required commands using the XML-RPC protocol over HTTPS. This resource describes the architecture in detail. Users can also set up a master-less and de-centralized Puppet setup, as described here.

#DevOps Tools #Continuous Integration And Delivery #Developer Tools 1 social mentions

2

Chef

Chef started off as an internal end-to-end server deployment tool for OpsCode before it was released as an open source solution. Chef also uses a client-server architecture and offers configuration in a Ruby DSL using the imperative programming paradigm. Its flexible cloud infrastructure automation framework allows users to install apps to bare metal VMs and cloud containers. Its architecture is fairly similar to the Puppet master-agent model and uses a pull-based approach, except that an additional logical Chef workstation is required to control configurations from the master to agents. Agents poll the information from master servers that respond via SSH. Several SaaS and hybrid delivery models are available to handle analytics and reporting.

#DevOps Tools #Dev Ops #Product Deployment

3

Ansible

As a latest entrant in the market compared with Puppet, Chef and Salt, Ansible was developed to simplify complex orchestration and configuration management tasks. The platform is written in Python and allows users to script commands in YAML as an imperative programming paradigm. Ansible offers multiple push models to send command modules to nodes via SSH that are executed sequentially. Ansible doesn’t require agents on every system, and modules can reside on any server. A centralized Ansible workstation is commonly used to tunnel commands through multiple Bastion host servers and access machines in a private network.

#DevOps Tools #IT Automation #Build And Deployment Automation 9 social mentions

4

SaltStack

Puppet, Chef, Ansible and SaltStack present different paths to achieve a common goal of managing large-scale server infrastructure efficiently, with minimal input from developers and sysadmins. All four configuration management tools are designed to reduce the complexity of configuring distributed infrastructure resources, enabling speed, and ensuring reliability and compliance. This article explores the mechanism, value propositions and concerns pertaining to each configuration management solution.

#DevOps Tools #Security #Web Application Security