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Ansible VS Google App Engine

Compare Ansible VS Google App Engine 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

Google App Engine logo Google App Engine

A powerful platform to build web and mobile apps that scale automatically.
  • Ansible Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-02-05
  • Google App Engine Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-17

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.

Google App Engine features and specs

  • Auto-scaling
    Google App Engine automatically scales your application based on the traffic it receives, ensuring that your application can handle varying workloads without manual intervention.
  • Managed environment
    App Engine provides a fully managed environment, covering infrastructure management tasks like server provisioning, patching, monitoring, and managing app versions.
  • Integrated services
    Seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud services such as Datastore, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, and more, offering a comprehensive ecosystem for building and deploying applications.
  • Multiple languages support
    Supports multiple programming languages including Java, Python, PHP, Node.js, Go, Ruby, and .NET, giving developers flexibility in choosing their preferred language.
  • Security
    Offers robust security features including Identity and Access Management (IAM), Cloud Identity, and automated security updates, which help protect your applications from vulnerabilities.
  • Developer productivity
    App Engine allows rapid development and deployment, letting developers focus on writing code without worrying about infrastructure management, thus boosting productivity.
  • Versioning
    Supports versioning of applications, allowing multiple versions of the application to be hosted simultaneously, which helps in A/B testing and rollback capabilities.

Possible disadvantages of Google App Engine

  • Cost
    While you pay for what you use, costs can escalate quickly with high traffic or resource-intensive applications. Detailed cost prediction can be challenging.
  • Vendor lock-in
    Relying heavily on Google App Engine's proprietary services and APIs can make it difficult to migrate applications to other platforms, leading to vendor lock-in.
  • Limited control
    Being a fully managed service, App Engine provides limited control over the underlying infrastructure which might be a limitation for certain advanced use cases.
  • Environment constraints
    Certain restrictions and limitations are imposed on the runtime environment, such as request timeout limits and specific resource quotas, which can affect application performance.
  • Complex debugging
    Debugging issues in a highly abstracted managed environment can be more complex and difficult compared to traditional server-hosted applications.
  • Cold start latency
    Serverless environments like App Engine can suffer from cold start latency, where the initial request triggers a delay as the environment spins up resources.
  • Configuration complexity
    Despite its benefits, configuring and optimizing App Engine for specific scenarios can be more complex than expected, requiring a steep learning curve.

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

Google App Engine videos

Get to know Google App Engine

More videos:

  • Review - Developing apps that scale automatically with Google App Engine

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Ansible and Google App Engine)
DevOps Tools
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Computing
0 0%
100% 100
Continuous Integration
100 100%
0% 0
Cloud Hosting
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 Google App Engine

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...

Google App Engine Reviews

Top 5 Alternatives to Heroku
Google App Engine is fast, easy, but not that very cheap. The pricing is reasonable, and it comes with a free tier, which is great for small projects that are right for beginner developers who want to quickly set up their apps. It can also auto scale, create new instances as needed and automatically handle high availability. App Engine gets a positive rating for performance...
AppScale - The Google App Engine Alternative
AppScale is open source Google App Engine and allows you to run your GAE applications on any infrastructure, anywhere that makes sense for your business. AppScale eliminates lock-in and makes your GAE application portable. This way you can choose which public or private cloud platform is the best fit for your business requirements. Because we are literally the GAE...

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Google App Engine should be more popular than Ansible. It has been mentiond 31 times since March 2021. 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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Google App Engine mentions (31)

  • Guide to modern app-hosting without servers on Google Cloud
    If Google App Engine (GAE) is the "OG" serverless platform, Cloud Run (GCR) is its logical successor, crafted for today's modern app-hosting needs. GAE was the 1st generation of Google serverless platforms. It has since been joined, about a decade later, by 2nd generation services, GCR and Cloud Functions (GCF). GCF is somewhat out-of-scope for this post so I'll cover that another time. - Source: dev.to / 4 months ago
  • Security in the Cloud: Your Role in the Shared Responsibility Model
    As Windsales Inc. expands, it adopts a PaaS model to offload server and runtime management, allowing its developers and engineers to focus on code development and deployment. By partnering with providers like Heroku and Google App Engine, Windsales Inc. Accesses a fully managed runtime environment. This choice relieves Windsales Inc. Of managing servers, OS updates, or runtime environment behavior. Instead,... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • Hosting apps in the cloud with Google App Engine in 2024
    Google App Engine (GAE) is their original serverless solution and first cloud product, launching in 2008 (video), giving rise to Serverless 1.0 and the cloud computing platform-as-a-service (PaaS) service level. It didn't do function-hosting nor was the concept of containers mainstream yet. GAE was specifically for (web) app-hosting (but also supported mobile backends as well). - Source: dev.to / 7 months ago
  • Fixing A Broken Deployment to Google App Engine
    In 2014, I took a web development on Udacity that was taught by Steve Huffman of Reddit fame. He taught authentication, salting passwords, the difference between GET and POST requests, basic html and css, caching techniques. It was a fantastic introduction to web dev. To pass the course, students deployed simple python servers to Google App Engine. When I started to look for work, I opted to use code from that... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
  • Next.js Deployment: Vercel's Charm vs. GCP's Muscle
    GCP offers a comprehensive suite of cloud services, including Compute Engine, App Engine, and Cloud Run. This translates to unparalleled control over your infrastructure and deployment configurations. Designed for large-scale applications, GCP effortlessly scales to accommodate significant traffic growth. Additionally, for projects heavily reliant on Google services like BigQuery, Cloud Storage, or AI/ML tools,... - Source: dev.to / 10 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Ansible and Google App Engine, 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.

Salesforce Platform - Salesforce Platform is a comprehensive PaaS solution that paves the way for the developers to test, build, and mitigate the issues in the cloud application before the final deployment.

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

Dokku - Docker powered mini-Heroku in around 100 lines of Bash

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

Heroku - Agile deployment platform for Ruby, Node.js, Clojure, Java, Python, and Scala. Setup takes only minutes and deploys are instant through git. Leave tedious server maintenance to Heroku and focus on your code.