Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ansible VS Apache Kafka

Compare Ansible VS Apache Kafka and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Ansible logo Ansible

Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine

Apache Kafka logo Apache Kafka

Apache Kafka is an open-source message broker project developed by the Apache Software Foundation written in Scala.
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05
  • Apache Kafka Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-10-01

Ansible features and specs

  • Agentless
    Ansible is agentless, meaning it doesn't require any software to be installed on the remote nodes. This simplifies management and reduces overhead.
  • Ease of Use
    Ansible uses a simple, easy-to-read YAML syntax for its playbooks, reducing the learning curve and making it accessible to those without extensive programming experience.
  • Scalability
    Ansible is designed to handle large-scale deployments, making it suitable for managing numerous machines or services efficiently.
  • Extensive Modules
    Ansible has a rich library of modules that support a wide variety of system tasks, cloud providers, and application deployments, offering great versatility.
  • Strong Community
    There is a large and active Ansible community that contributes to its development and provides support, which can be valuable for troubleshooting and learning best practices.
  • Idempotency
    Tasks in Ansible are idempotent, meaning they can be run multiple times without changing the system beyond the intended final state, ensuring reliable deployments.

Possible disadvantages of Ansible

  • Performance Overhead
    Being agentless, Ansible relies on SSH for communication with nodes, which can add performance overhead, especially when managing a large number of hosts.
  • Limited Windows Support
    Ansible's core is primarily designed for Unix-like systems, and while there is support for Windows, it's not as robust or as seamless as it is for Unix/Linux systems.
  • Lack of Built-in Error Handling
    Ansible's error handling is somewhat rudimentary out-of-the-box. Complex error handling scenarios often require custom solutions, which can complicate playbooks.
  • Learning Curve for Complex Scenarios
    While simple tasks are easy to set up, more complex configurations can become challenging quickly and may require a deep understanding of Ansible's modules and templating.
  • Reliance on YAML
    The use of YAML, while human-readable, can be prone to syntax errors such as incorrect indentation, which can potentially lead to hard-to-track-down bugs.
  • Dependency on Python
    Ansible requires Python to be installed on managed nodes. This could be an issue in environments where it's not feasible or desired to have Python installed.

Apache Kafka features and specs

  • High Throughput
    Kafka is capable of handling thousands of messages per second due to its distributed architecture, making it suitable for applications that require high throughput.
  • Scalability
    Kafka can easily scale horizontally by adding more brokers to a cluster, making it highly scalable to serve increased loads.
  • Fault Tolerance
    Kafka has built-in replication, ensuring that data is replicated across multiple brokers, providing fault tolerance and high availability.
  • Durability
    Kafka ensures data durability by writing data to disk, which can be replicated to other nodes, ensuring data is not lost even if a broker fails.
  • Real-time Processing
    Kafka supports real-time data streaming, enabling applications to process and react to data as it arrives.
  • Decoupling of Systems
    Kafka acts as a buffer and decouples the production and consumption of messages, allowing independent scaling and management of producers and consumers.
  • Wide Ecosystem
    The Kafka ecosystem includes various tools and connectors such as Kafka Streams, Kafka Connect, and KSQL, which enrich the functionality of Kafka.
  • Strong Community Support
    Kafka has strong community support and extensive documentation, making it easier for developers to find help and resources.

Possible disadvantages of Apache Kafka

  • Complex Setup and Management
    Kafka's distributed nature can make initial setup and ongoing management complex, requiring expert knowledge and significant administrative effort.
  • Operational Overhead
    Running Kafka clusters involves additional operational overhead, including hardware provisioning, monitoring, tuning, and scaling.
  • Latency Sensitivity
    Despite its high throughput, Kafka may experience increased latency in certain scenarios, especially when configured for high durability and consistency.
  • Learning Curve
    The concepts and architecture of Kafka can be difficult for new users to grasp, leading to a steep learning curve.
  • Hardware Intensive
    Kafka's performance characteristics often require dedicated and powerful hardware, which can be costly to procure and maintain.
  • Dependency Management
    Managing Kafka's dependencies and ensuring compatibility between versions of Kafka, Zookeeper, and other ecosystem tools can be challenging.
  • Limited Support for Small Messages
    Kafka is optimized for large throughput and can be inefficient for applications that require handling a lot of small messages, where overhead can become significant.
  • Operational Complexity for Small Teams
    Smaller teams might find the operational complexity and maintenance burden of Kafka difficult to manage without a dedicated operations or DevOps team.

Ansible videos

What Is Ansible? | How Ansible Works? | Ansible Tutorial For Beginners | DevOps Tools | Simplilearn

More videos:

  • Review - Automation with Ansible Playbooks | Review on Ansible Architecture
  • Review - Book Review : Mastering Ansible (Jesse Keating) by Zareef Ahmed

Apache Kafka videos

Apache Kafka Tutorial | What is Apache Kafka? | Kafka Tutorial for Beginners | Edureka

More videos:

  • Review - Apache Kafka - Getting Started - Kafka Multi-node Cluster - Review Properties
  • Review - 4. Apache Kafka Fundamentals | Confluent Fundamentals for Apache Kafka®
  • Review - Apache Kafka in 6 minutes
  • Review - Apache Kafka Explained (Comprehensive Overview)
  • Review - 2. Motivations and Customer Use Cases | Apache Kafka Fundamentals

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ansible and Apache Kafka)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Stream Processing
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Data Integration
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Ansible and Apache Kafka

Ansible Reviews

What Are The Best Alternatives To Ansible? | Attune, Jenkins &, etc.
To put it simply, Ansible automates a wide range of IT aspects that includes configuration management, application deployment, cloud provisioning, etc. Plus, while using Ansible, you can patch your application, automate deployments, and run compliances and governance on your application. You can easily manage it by using a web interface known as Ansible Tower. Furthermore,...
Best 8 Ansible Alternatives & equivalent in 2022
Ansible is a simple IT automation tool that is easy to deploy. It connects to your nodes and pushes out small programs called “Ansible modules” to those nodes. Then it executes these models over SSH and removes them when finished. The library of modules will reside on any machine, therefore there is no requirement for any servers and databases.
Source: www.guru99.com
Top 5 Ansible Alternatives in 2022: Server Automation Solutions by Alexander Fashakin on the 19th Aug 2021 facebook Linked In Twitter
Your project connects to Ansible through nodes called Ansible Modules. You can use these modules to manage your project. As an agentless architecture, Ansible allows you to run modules on any system or server. It doesn’t require client/server software or an agent to be installed. With Ansible, you can use Python Paramiko modules or SSH protocols.
Ansible vs Chef: What’s the Difference?
For Ansible, Simplilearn presents the Ansible Foundation Training Course. Ansible 2.0, a simple, popular, agent-free tool in the automation domain, helps increase team productivity and improve business outcomes. Learn with
Chef vs Puppet vs Ansible
Ansible supports considerable ease of learning for the management of configurations due to YAML as the foundation language. YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) is closely similar to English and is human-readable. The server can help in pushing configurations to all the nodes. The applications of Ansible are clearly suitable for real-time execution along with the facility of...

Apache Kafka Reviews

Best ETL Tools: A Curated List
Debezium is an open-source Change Data Capture (CDC) tool that originated from RedHat. It leverages Apache Kafka and Kafka Connect to enable real-time data replication from databases. Debezium was partly inspired by Martin Kleppmann’s "Turning the Database Inside Out" concept, which emphasized the power of the CDC for modern data pipelines.
Source: estuary.dev
Best message queue for cloud-native apps
If you take the time to sort out the history of message queues, you will find a very interesting phenomenon. Most of the currently popular message queues were born around 2010. For example, Apache Kafka was born at LinkedIn in 2010, Derek Collison developed Nats in 2010, and Apache Pulsar was born at Yahoo in 2012. What is the reason for this?
Source: docs.vanus.ai
Are Free, Open-Source Message Queues Right For You?
Apache Kafka is a highly scalable and robust messaging queue system designed by LinkedIn and donated to the Apache Software Foundation. It's ideal for real-time data streaming and processing, providing high throughput for publishing and subscribing to records or messages. Kafka is typically used in scenarios that require real-time analytics and monitoring, IoT applications,...
Source: blog.iron.io
10 Best Open Source ETL Tools for Data Integration
It is difficult to anticipate the exact demand for open-source tools in 2023 because it depends on various factors and emerging trends. However, open-source solutions such as Kubernetes for container orchestration, TensorFlow for machine learning, Apache Kafka for real-time data streaming, and Prometheus for monitoring and observability are expected to grow in prominence in...
Source: testsigma.com
11 Best FREE Open-Source ETL Tools in 2024
Apache Kafka is an Open-Source Data Streaming Tool written in Scala and Java. It publishes and subscribes to a stream of records in a fault-tolerant manner and provides a unified, high-throughput, and low-latency platform to manage data.
Source: hevodata.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Apache Kafka seems to be a lot more popular than Ansible. While we know about 144 links to Apache Kafka, we've tracked only 9 mentions of Ansible. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Ansible mentions (9)

  • Mentorship Group
    We are open to practice using any open-source project, however, we want to set a sharp focus on projects maintained by the Red Hat, and our own projects in the Caravana Cloud organization on github. If there is no reason to do differently, we'll build using technologies such as OpenShift, Quarkus, Ansible and related projects. - Source: dev.to / almost 2 years ago
  • Observability Mythbusters: Yes, Observability-Landscape-as-Code is a Thing
    *Codifying the deployment of the OTel Collector *(to Nomad, Kubernetes, or a VM) using tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible. The Collector funnels your OTel data to your Observability back-end. ✅. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Maintenance mode - vmware.vmware_rest Ansible collection
    Most of what I've learnt today was purley from this blog and only because it's from ansible.com - dated now I guess ... Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Proactive Kubernetes Monitoring with Alerting
    I installed the helm release using Ansible, but you can install with the following helm commands:. - Source: dev.to / almost 3 years ago
  • Cannot run a playbook in crontab - Python error
    [root@ansible ~]# pip show ansible Name: ansible Version: 2.9.25 Summary: Radically simple IT automation Home-page: https://ansible.com/ Author: Ansible, Inc. Author-email: info@ansible.com License: GPLv3+ Location: /usr/lib/python2.7/site-packagesRequires: jinja2, PyYAML, cryptography Required-by:. Source: over 3 years ago
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Apache Kafka mentions (144)

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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ansible and Apache Kafka, you can also consider the following products

Chef - Automation for all of your technology. Overcome the complexity and rapidly ship your infrastructure and apps anywhere with automation.

RabbitMQ - RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software.

Jenkins - Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration server with 300+ plugins to support all kinds of software development

StatCounter - StatCounter is a simple but powerful real-time web analytics service that helps you track, analyse and understand your visitors so you can make good decisions to become more successful online.

Codeship - Codeship is a fast and secure hosted Continuous Delivery platform that scales with your needs.

Histats - Start tracking your visitors in 1 minute!