Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
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Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
1–10 of 182 posts
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#2Very interesting. At least they aren't cfengine.
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#3Personally a fan of Ansible, but I've also been pretty impressed by SaltStack as well. Either is much simpler and easier to use than the older generations of configuration management tools (cfengine, Puppet, Chef.)
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#4I've been using SaltStack + SaltCloud in a production environment for the past six months or so -- it's been a total joy compared to my experiences with Puppet / Chef.
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#5Hi ansible author here!
This was definitely an interesting comparison but to correct a few misconceptions:
Ansible has 810 contributors at this point. I'd love to say I wrote everything but it's a huge shared effort.
We also have a lot of mods other projects don't, so some comparison aspects were not even.
We do say no when we disagree. I think that's important. Filtering and testing makes a project what it is to a degree. There is always the project and development list to discuss things and they are really big lists. All being said not transferring a file verbatim is for example still the right call for us.
Try what you like by all means! But I would suggest that it not be inferred I eat children :). Only sometimes!
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#6I'm very happy with Ansible. Salt looks good too.
Too many of the other alternatives seem to be focused on the easy part of the problem (running commands on lots of nodes) without putting enough effort into the hard part of the problem (automatically deciding which commands to run to get to the desired state).
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#7Interesting article but the design of the site made reading it give me a headache. I recently also made a move as well, went from Chef to Ansible and I am really happy I did. Chef was a pain.
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#8It's unfortunate that this article focuses on running the playbooks/salt states locally. The use of ssh by ansible was the killer feature for me. Configuring a remote cluster without requiring a persistent master. There are valid arguments for maintaining a persistent master, but it's just not in the cards sometimes.
I know salt-ssh exists but it's still alpha, I look forward to seeing how it pans out and whether it can avoid being a second-class citizen to the persistent, non-standard zeromq sockets.
That being said, ansible configuration files are fairly hacky and conceptually just don't quite fit. Some modules support a full yaml-dict whereas others need the string with key=value parts. Sometimes you need to wrap your jinja2 syntax in a yaml string to avoid it being parsed as a yaml dict. There's just some things that don't quite add up so there's definitely room for improvement.
I think I'll live with it until I gain confidence with nix though!
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#9It's unfortunate that this article focuses on running the playbooks/salt states locally. The use of ssh by ansible was the killer feature for me. Configuring a remote cluster without requiring a persistent master. There are valid arguments for maintaining a persistent master, but it's just not in the cards sometimes. I know salt-ssh exists but it's still alpha, I look forward to seeing how it pans out and whether it…
Salt devs don't have any reason to make salt-ssh a second-class citizen, because they're working on a third transport. Everything's going to be (mostly, already is) abstracted from the transport so that salt-ssh, zeromq, and raet (the new transport, a kind of hierarchical distribution of messages to deal with massive deployments where the zeromq one-master-to-all-minions setup has scaling problems) are interchangeable. Also, raet uses CurveCP rather than rolling their own crypto, minimizing area where they can screw up enc/auth.
Re: Moving away from Puppet: SaltStack or Ansible?
#10I remember initially looking at the saltstack docs and deciding, like the author of the post, that they were extremely dense at first glance. It's interesting to read that after he'd used salt for a while the dense documentation was useful.