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Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

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Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#101

Post by wernerb »

buro9 wrote: post #98

I look for two things when considering configuration tools. 1. How does it handle cross-cutting concerns? 2. How does it handle complex configuration files? For the cross-cutting concerns I use the firewall as an example. I look to see how multiple projects and modules (that are going to be installed on a machine) can declare their firewall rules. I'm a Puppet user presently, but a quick look says that Ansible has gr…

Any (configuration)file can be installed and/or templated with both Ansible and Salt. This includes whatever Nginx has for configuration.

I'm not 100% with both, but I guess you have nginx be installed in some dedicated pillar/playbook and you can have your application pillar/playbook include templated configuration files to be inserted into /etc/nginx/conf.d and notify the service to be reloaded somehow.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#102

Post by Keats »

dba7dba wrote: post #78
jasonkolb wrote: post #61

Ansible seems to have more traction: https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=ansible%2C%20saltsta...

Depends on how you view it. According to the chart Ansible has been around since 2005? Salt is barely 2 years old? Look at the uptick of the last few months and SaltStack seems ever slightly steeper than Ansible. I am SaltStack guy, albeit a newbie. Barely got done installing (much much easier than Puppet) and trying out few commands. I was hooked on SaltStack when I was able to run following command once and get res…

First commit for Ansible in 2012 (https://github.com/ansible/ansible/commits/devel?page=329).

I guess the previous searches are for the scifi tech devices

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#103

Post by unkoman »

_Soulou wrote: post #22

I read that for some of you the Chef experience was painful. I'm using chef-solo with the chef-solo-search cookbook and everything is working pretty fluently. Each of my node owns the entire repository and apply chef-solo on itself. With a cron to periodically update the chef repository, it is really confortable. I agree that using chef-server is a bit painful (that's why I don't), but otherwise there are a lot of co…

The documentation is sub-par and rarely updated. Otherwise, it's nice, especially in AWS.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#104

Post by mianos »

KaiserPro wrote: post #96

Having deployed salt to a medium sized cluster ~1500 farm machines, and around 1500 desktops, the one thing that salt won't do is scale. Salt has a lovely system where clients attach themselves to a zeromq and listen for commands. However after about 500 clients it starts to fail silently and not all clients update properly. The way we get round it is to run salt-call on the client at specific intervals. The other an…

I would post a bug report. I know linkedin has over 10k nodes with saltstack. Thomas was there tuning it so I'm sure it should work.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#105

Post by Karunamon »

twic wrote: post #88
Kiro wrote: post #80

May I ask why people think Puppet sucks?

Crazy slow, linguistically poor, parser breaks in every release, really hard to test locally.

I notice none of these problems on a 3.2 deployment with about 500 nodes.

I find that Ansible is roughly identical doing the same things on the same machines timewise, not going to get into the subjective argument about the language, the parser syntax is backwards compatible between major releases (and they go well out of their way to warn you what you'll need to change before something actually does break), and I don't see how it's any harder to test locally than any other config management tool.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#106

Post by e12e »

I've always been a bit wary of salt after:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/2239

Perhaps unfairly so... yet, I'm not entirely put at ease by:

https://github.com/saltstack/salt/issues/5913

Did salt ever move to a secure transport?

Then there's the (linked above, inline) issue with RSA exponent.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#107

Post by KaiserPro »

mianos wrote: post #104
KaiserPro wrote: post #96

Having deployed salt to a medium sized cluster ~1500 farm machines, and around 1500 desktops, the one thing that salt won't do is scale. Salt has a lovely system where clients attach themselves to a zeromq and listen for commands. However after about 500 clients it starts to fail silently and not all clients update properly. The way we get round it is to run salt-call on the client at specific intervals. The other an…

I would post a bug report. I know linkedin has over 10k nodes with saltstack. Thomas was there tuning it so I'm sure it should work.

its something they know about. The current workaround is multiple masters, which isn't entirely practical

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#108

Post by stevekemp »

uggedal wrote: post #68

As someone who used Puppet for some years, went to Salt[1], then Ansible[2], I've setteled on POSIX sh[3], 1: http://git.uggedal.com/historic/states/ 2: http://git.uggedal.com/historic/playbooks/ 3: http://git.uggedal.com/conf

I moved to a perl-based solution because that's a bit neater than shell:

http://steve.org.uk/Software/slaughter/

I find it works well, each node pulls configuration from github, an rsync share, or similar, and executes locally. So there's no master in the traditional sense.

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#109

Post by zwischenzug »

darklajid wrote: post #76

I haven't looked at Salt, but I had a love/hate relationship with Ansible so far. To be clear: Starting with Ansible was amazing, the first couple steps were easy and enlightening. Maybe I'm expecting too much now and act entitled or something? That said, it broke down rather quickly. - My first issue was documentation. This article is correct about the current state of the documentation, but the site was in a really…

"Everything I try to do in Ansible seems to turn into a shell script"

This was my disappointment with Ansible (and other CM tools) - so why not treat the shell as the basic unit of action? See my post elsewhere on this page for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8135823

Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?

#110

Post by mjfisher »

zhynn wrote: post #15

While I have been a happy Ansible user for some time, the criticisims that the author pointed out that really resonated with me were: - Ansible is slow even when it doesn't have anything to do. This is true. For example, we manage lists of former users that should not exist on systems, this gets quite slow. I think that the slowness is mostly due to SSH, but it could be smarter about bulk operations, I suppose. - Cus…

> It's lightyears better than Puppet/Chef, and I am glad both exist. :)

I'm pretty new to the world of CM, and have just started playing around with Chef and Vagrant. I've been pleasantly surprised by the utility of Chef (i.e. miles better than setting up machines by hand or shell script and worth the learning curve).

Are there any particular areas of weakness when compared to Ansible/Salt/etc.? I've read a few Chef vs. Ansible vs. Puppet style blogposts, but they never seem to come to particularly strong conclusions.

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