Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Ansible VS Cycle.io

Compare Ansible VS Cycle.io and see what are their differences

Ansible logo Ansible

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

Cycle.io logo Cycle.io

The developer-friendly container platform. Chose your infrastructure, upload your containers, and scale with ease.
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05
  • Cycle.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-08

Cycle is a developer-friendly container orchestration platform. By simplifying the processes around container and infrastructure deployments, Cycle enables developers to spend more time building and less time managing. With automatic platform updates, standardized deployments, a powerful API, and bottleneck crushing automation—the platform empowers organizations to have the capabilities of an elite DevOps team at one-tenth the cost.

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.

Cycle.io features and specs

  • Ease of Use
    Cycle.io provides a user-friendly interface that simplifies the deployment and management of applications, making it accessible for developers with various expertise levels.
  • Automation Features
    It includes automation tools to handle tasks like scaling and updating applications, reducing manual intervention and saving time for developers.
  • Infrastructure Abstraction
    Cycle.io abstracts the underlying infrastructure, allowing developers to focus more on code and less on managing servers, which can streamline development processes.
  • Multi-cloud Deployment
    The platform supports multi-cloud environments, enabling users to deploy applications across various cloud providers seamlessly, enhancing flexibility and redundancy.

Possible disadvantages of Cycle.io

  • Limited Customization
    Due to its infrastructure abstraction, developers might face limitations in customizing the environment compared to traditional infrastructure management.
  • Learning Curve
    While it is user-friendly, there is still a learning curve associated with understanding its unique platform and features, especially for those new to containerization.
  • Vendor Lock-in Concerns
    Relying heavily on Cycle.io's ecosystem could create challenges if users decide to switch to a different service, potentially leading to difficulties in migration.
  • Cost Considerations
    Depending on usage, the cost of using Cycle.io can become significant, and users need to evaluate whether its benefits justify the expense for their specific cases.

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

Cycle.io videos

Introducing Cycle.io

More videos:

  • Review - Cycle.io an Container as a Service platform

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ansible and Cycle.io)
DevOps Tools
96 96%
4% 4
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Ansible and Cycle.io. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

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...

Cycle.io Reviews

Top 12 Kubernetes Alternatives to Choose From in 2023
What sets Cycle.io apart is its focus on automation and streamlined workflows. It offers built-in integrations with popular CI/CD tools, version control systems, and other development platforms, enabling seamless deployment and continuous integration processes.
Source: humalect.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Cycle.io might be a bit more popular than Ansible. We know about 9 links to it since March 2021 and only 9 links to 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
View more

Cycle.io mentions (9)

  • Resigning from a role of being "the guy"
    Sorry for the shameless plug but maybe my company https://cycle.io could help? I’ve seen so many people with this same problem and it’s why I started building this platform. Happy to chat just DM me. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Monthly 'Shameless Self Promotion' thread - 2022/11
    I'm a founder at Cycle, a full devops platform and alternative to Kubernetes, with a focus on simplicity without any sacrifice. It's fully multi/hybrid cloud (including on-prem) where you bring your own infrastructure. Source: over 2 years ago
  • DevOps Starter Stack
    You can use the free tier over at cycle.io as a deployment target - I actually just wrote (I work at Cycle) a blog post on basic Github Actions and Cycle. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Can I use docker container with gui?
    It is possible - I've actually set this up to solve a very weird QA issue while testing some platform change during my work at cycle.io - heres a link to the DockerHub - I can tell you, you'll have to work at it a bit to get it to do what you want but its exactly what you're talking about. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Best way to manage containers on different servers
    Im partial, given that I work for the company, but what you're looking for exactly is cycle.io - feel free to DM me if you have questions. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ansible and Cycle.io, 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.

OpenShift - OpenShift gives you all the tools you need to develop, host and scale your apps in the public or private cloud. Get started today.

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

Kubernetes - Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers

Puppet Enterprise - Get started with Puppet Enterprise, or upgrade or expand.

Cast.ai - CAST AI is an AI-driven platform designed to optimize cloud usage and reduce costs by over 60%. It is an all-in-one solution for Kubernetes monitoring, automation, optimization, and security.