Puppet Labs vs Rex

Overview

Puppet Labs

Stacks1.3K

Followers793

Votes227

GitHub Stars7.7K

Forks2.2K

Rex

Stacks11

Followers18

Votes2

GitHub Stars729

Forks219

Puppet Labs vs Rex: What are the differences?

Puppet Labs: Server automation framework and application. 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; Rex: the friendly automation framework. Rex is an automation framework that combines Perl and Secure Shell (SSH) for a portable and highly flexible approach to data center infrastructure management and software deployment.

Puppet Labs and Rex belong to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack.

Some of the features offered by Puppet Labs are:

Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.
Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.
Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.

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

Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.
Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.
It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.

Puppet Labs and Rex are both open source tools. Puppet Labs with 5.79K GitHub stars and 2.15K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Rex with 620 GitHub stars and 204 GitHub forks.

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Advice on Puppet Labs, Rex

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

Puppet Labs	Rex
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.	Rex is an automation framework that combines Perl and Secure Shell (SSH) for a portable and highly flexible approach to data center infrastructure management and software deployment.
Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.;Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.;Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.;Configuration Management- Puppet Enterprise's declarative, model-based approach automates repetitive tasks and eliminates configuration drift. You define the desired state of your infrastructure, and Puppet Enterprise enforces this state, freeing you to work on tougher projects.;Orchestration- Quickly deploy critical updates, like security patches, across hundreds of servers in seconds, or proactively initiate Puppet runs to update configurations and report changes. Puppet Enterprise allows you to orchestrate controlled, multi-step operations to targeted collections of nodes, giving you complete control over infrastructure changes.;Reporting- Get visibility into your infrastructure, browse resources, and view reports that help you manage your configuration. Puppet Enterprise provides node hardware and software inventory, Puppet run change reports, and node configuration graphs via the product's console or 3rd party APIs.	Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.; Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.; It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 7.7K	GitHub Stars 729
GitHub Forks 2.2K	GitHub Forks 219
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 11
Followers 793	Followers 18
Votes 227	Votes 2
Pros & Cons
Pros 52 Devops 44 Automate it 26 Reusable components 21 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 18 Great community Cons 3 Steep learning curve 1 Customs types idempotence	Pros 2 Much simple to use or start with, if you know perl
Integrations
No integrations available	KVM Docker VirtualBox openSUSE OpenStack LXC Ubuntu OpenSSH Perl Void Linux

What are some alternatives to Puppet Labs, Rex?

Ansible

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.

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.

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

Some of the features offered by Puppet Labs are:

Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.
Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.
Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.

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

Puts you in charge: Rex acknowledges that there is more than one way to manage it. It trusts you to be in the best position to decide what to automate and how, allowing you to build the automation tool your situation requires.
Easy to get on board: automate what you are doing today, and add more tomorrow. Rex is instantly usable, making it ideal and friendly for incremental automation.
It's just Perl: Perl is a battle-tested, mature language. Whenever you reach the limitations of the built-in Rex features, a powerful programming language and module ecosystem is directly available at your fingertips to seamlessly extend it even in other languages. So after all, it's not just Perl.

Puppet Labs vs Rex