Ansible vs VisualOps

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

VisualOps

Stacks8

Followers33

Votes1

Ansible vs VisualOps: What are the differences?

Ansible: Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine. 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; VisualOps: Visual DevOps Automation for Amazon Web Services. VisualOps has a WYSIWYG editor to design, configure and provision your AWS cloud applications. Once the applications are deployed, VisualOps continuously monitors and manages the apps to ensure they always run in the defined states.

Ansible and VisualOps can be primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.

Some of the features offered by Ansible are:

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.

On the other hand, VisualOps provides the following key features:

drag-n-drop components to build your AWS infrastructure
clicks instances to setup the software configuration (package, file, code, etc.)
single click to deploy, within minutes the app is ready to use!

Ansible is an open source tool with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Ansible's open source repository on GitHub.

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Advice on Ansible, VisualOps

Rogério

Software Developer

Aug 10, 2021

Needs adviceon

Docker

Git

Linux

Personal Dotfiles management

Given that they are all “configuration management” tools - meaning they are designed to deploy, configure and manage servers - what would be the simplest - and yet robust - solution to manage personal dotfiles - for n00bs.

Ideally, I reckon, it should:

be containerized (@{Docker}|tool:586|?)
be versionable (@{Git}|tool:1046|)
ensure idempotency
allow full automation (tests, CI/CD, etc.)
be fully recoverable (@{Linux}|tool:10483|/ @{macOS}|tool:5560|)
be easier to setup/manage (as much as possible)

Does it make sense?

282k views282k

Comments

Hendrik

CEO at Forward H

Dec 13, 2021

Decided

Terraform provides a cloud-provider agnostic way of provisioning cloud infrastructure while AWS CloudFormation is limited to AWS.

Pulumi is a great tool that provides similar features as Terraform, including advanced features like policy and cost management.

We see that Terraform has great support in the cloud community. For most cloud services we use, there is an official Terraform provider. We also believe in the declarative model of HCL, which is why we chose Terraform over Pulumi. However, we still keep an eye on Pulumi's progress.

Ansible is great for provisioning software and configuration within virtual machines, but we don't think that Ansible is the right tool for provisioning cloud infrastructure since it's built around the assumption that there is an inventory of remote machines. Terraform also supports more services that we use than Ansible.

22.2k views22.2k

Comments

ajit

Jan 12, 2022

Needs adviceon

Rundeck

Ansible

Jenkins

We have a lot of operations running using Rundeck (including deployments) and we also have various roles created in Ansible for infrastructure creation, which we execute using Rundeck. Rundeck we are using a community edition. Since we are already using Rundeck for executing the Ansible role, need an advice. What difference will it make if we replace Rundeck with Ansible Tower? Advantages and Disadvantages? We are using Jenkins to call Rundeck Job, same will be used for Ansible Tower if we replace Rundeck.

110k views110k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ansible	VisualOps
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.	VisualOps has a WYSIWYG editor to design, configure and provision your AWS cloud applications. Once the applications are deployed, VisualOps continuously monitors and manages the apps to ensure they always run in the defined states.
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.	drag-n-drop components to build your AWS infrastructure;clicks instances to setup the software configuration (package, file, code, etc.);single click to deploy, within minutes the app is ready to use!;VisualOps will ensure your app to be always up & running, in the state you defined
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 8
Followers 15.6K	Followers 33
Votes 1.3K	Votes 1
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 Backward compatibility 3 Bloated	Pros 1 Satisfy documentation requirements
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Amazon SNS Amazon CloudWatch Amazon VPC Amazon EC2

What are some alternatives to Ansible, VisualOps?

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.