On 21/07/2012, at 11:41 AM, Chamberlain, Darren wrote: > * Marc Lucke <marc at marcsnet.com> [2012/07/20 20:11]: >> ...well there you have it. No advantages. Or nobody cares about >> this better system. Or nobody knows :) >> >> On 18/07/2012, at 8:54 AM, Marc Lucke wrote: >>> So I'm seeing a lot of hype around Ansible. It seems to be a >>> compelling story. I've looked around and found a lot of stories >>> about why you would use it over puppet, but not puppet over >>> ansible. Can anyone relate personal experiences or point to >>> some interesting reading? > > I've been investigating ansible over the last few weeks and I've > found it to have a lot of interesting things going for it: Ansible > is small, fast, lightweight, and consise, but also young, immature, > and rapidly evolving. Puppet has a vast and interesting ecosystem > around it, with lots of integration points with external tools; > ansible, by virtue of its youth, has none of that -- yet. For > example, if you want to set up a centralized dashboard to manage > your ansible jobs, you need to build it from scratch[*], while with > puppet, you have several mature alternates to choose from or build > upon. There are also numerous examples of puppet manifests and best > practices on the web, countless puppet modules freely available on > puppetforge and github, and many blog posts and presentations from > which to learn puppet, while ansible has basically just the mailing > lists (which is fairly active), the official docs, and a few github > repos of examples, but since ansible is evolving so rapidly these > examples are potentially of limited value. (Michael DeHaan has done > an admirable job of keeping the docs up-to-date, though.) > > The speed of ansible's evolution is actually my biggest concern > about it right now; I don't want to get in a situation where my > playbooks (ansible-speak for what puppet calls manifests and what > cfengine calls promises) become outdated and need to be rewritten. > (I have hit this problem with puppet, too, though; I unintentionally > used several features that have been changed or deprecated as puppet > evolved, especially ones involving variable scope.) > > Having said that, ansible is already incredibly usable and I haven't > yet found anything that I'm currently doing in puppet that I cannot > do in ansible. I'm using puppet to manage over 400 mixed-OS nodes in > a distributed, masterless environment, and I'm not using the > foreman, mcollective, puppetdb, storeconfigs, or any of those types > of features, so my environment might be fairly atypical. > > As for why one should choose puppet over ansible, I think the > deciding factors for most people will be the tool ecosystem, the > developer ecosystem, and your comfort with evolving tools. I am > personally of the opinion that the tools managing your > infrastructure should be as mature and surprise-free as possible, > since any change in those tools could cause all sorts of problems > down the line; with the changes coming in puppet 3.0, I think the > playing field is about level here -- ansible may be young, but > Michael seems to have a very clearly defined end goal for what > ansible will become, and I don't see that changing much. Puppet > obviously has the lead in the tool and developer ecosystem fronts, > by virtue of its maturity (as I mentioned above), so if reporting, > long-term trending, and the like is a hard requirement then ansible > cannot be considered. > > [*] I've actually got a very usable ansible dashboard setup using > Jeknins, pulling playbooks and inventory lists from subversion. > > -- > Darren Chamberlain <dar...@boston.com> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Puppet Users" group. > To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en. > Thanks Darren. One thing that struck me about puppet was that it seems like you can easily spend more time managing puppet than managing your machines until you hit some sort of critical mass even if you are more dev than ops. Ansible promises to lower the learning curve and simplify which is pulling some of the team I work in away from puppet because they resent having to write and debug code (if that's what they wanted to do, they'd have just been devs to begin with). The traditional old school stomping grounds of a sysadmin are procedural, predictable, pretty easy to use and relatively bug free which seems to be in stark contrast with puppet; if Ansible solves those problems then it's a compelling story.
Marc -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Puppet Users" group. To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
