Ansible vs Puppet Bolt

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Puppet Bolt

Stacks12

Followers25

Votes9

GitHub Stars539

Forks227

Ansible vs Puppet Bolt: What are the differences?

Installation and Setup: The installation and setup process of Ansible involves a simple and straightforward configuration, as it is agentless and requires only SSH access to the target hosts. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt requires the installation of the Bolt tool on the control machine and the installation of Bolt agents on the target hosts. This adds an extra step and complexity to the setup process.
Operating System Support: Ansible has a wider range of operating system support compared to Puppet Bolt. It can be used on various Linux distributions, Windows operating systems, macOS, and even network devices. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt has more limited support, primarily focusing on Linux and Windows.
Resource Abstraction: Ansible uses modules to abstract the resources it manages, which allows it to work with a wide range of systems without requiring any specific knowledge of the individual system internals. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, relies on Puppet's Resource Abstraction Layer (RAL), which provides a unified interface for managing specific resources on different target platforms.
Ease of Use: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use, with a minimal learning curve and its ability to use simple YAML files for defining automation tasks. Puppet Bolt, while also providing an easy-to-use interface, requires more knowledge of the underlying Puppet ecosystem and its specific language for defining tasks and plans.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community with extensive documentation, a wide range of pre-built modules, and integrations with other tools and systems. Puppet Bolt, while steadily growing, has a smaller community and ecosystem in comparison, which may limit the availability of pre-built content and support.
Control Plane Requirements: Ansible operates using a push-based model, where the control machine initiates the execution of tasks on the target hosts. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, can operate using a push-based model like Ansible, but it also supports a more flexible agent-based model where the target hosts pull tasks from the control machine. This gives Puppet Bolt more flexibility when dealing with certain network constraints or when working in highly regulated environments.

In Summary, Ansible and Puppet Bolt differ in their installation and setup process, operating system support, resource abstraction, ease of use, community and ecosystem, as well as the control plane requirements.

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Advice on Ansible, Puppet Bolt

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	Puppet Bolt
Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.	It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.
Ansible's natural automation language allows sysadmins, developers, and IT managers to complete automation projects in hours, not weeks.;Ansible uses SSH by default instead of requiring agents everywhere. Avoid extra open ports, improve security, eliminate "managing the management", and reclaim CPU cycles.;Ansible automates app deployment, configuration management, workflow orchestration, and even cloud provisioning all from one system.	Prebuilt tasks; Automate deployments; Open source; Agent-less or agent-based; Reuse existing scripts; Ruby-support; Python-support; Bash-support; Powershell-support; Workflow orchestration
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars 539
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 227
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 12
Followers 15.6K	Followers 25
Votes 1.3K	Votes 9
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility	Pros 3 Simple 2 Agentless 2 Powerful 2 Easy to Install
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Python Linux PowerShell Windows macOS

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Puppet Bolt?

Chef

Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.

Terraform

With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

Puppet Labs

Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.

Salt

Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Puppet Bolt: What are the differences?

Installation and Setup: The installation and setup process of Ansible involves a simple and straightforward configuration, as it is agentless and requires only SSH access to the target hosts. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt requires the installation of the Bolt tool on the control machine and the installation of Bolt agents on the target hosts. This adds an extra step and complexity to the setup process.
Operating System Support: Ansible has a wider range of operating system support compared to Puppet Bolt. It can be used on various Linux distributions, Windows operating systems, macOS, and even network devices. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt has more limited support, primarily focusing on Linux and Windows.
Resource Abstraction: Ansible uses modules to abstract the resources it manages, which allows it to work with a wide range of systems without requiring any specific knowledge of the individual system internals. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, relies on Puppet's Resource Abstraction Layer (RAL), which provides a unified interface for managing specific resources on different target platforms.
Ease of Use: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use, with a minimal learning curve and its ability to use simple YAML files for defining automation tasks. Puppet Bolt, while also providing an easy-to-use interface, requires more knowledge of the underlying Puppet ecosystem and its specific language for defining tasks and plans.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community with extensive documentation, a wide range of pre-built modules, and integrations with other tools and systems. Puppet Bolt, while steadily growing, has a smaller community and ecosystem in comparison, which may limit the availability of pre-built content and support.
Control Plane Requirements: Ansible operates using a push-based model, where the control machine initiates the execution of tasks on the target hosts. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, can operate using a push-based model like Ansible, but it also supports a more flexible agent-based model where the target hosts pull tasks from the control machine. This gives Puppet Bolt more flexibility when dealing with certain network constraints or when working in highly regulated environments.

Ansible vs Puppet Bolt

Overview