Ansible vs Visual Studio Team Services: What are the differences?
Ansible automates configuration and deployment, prioritizing simplicity, while Visual Studio Team Services (now Azure DevOps) is a comprehensive Microsoft platform for end-to-end DevOps activities. Here are the key differences between them.
Scalability: Ansible is highly scalable, allowing it to handle large-scale infrastructure and manage thousands of nodes. On the other hand, Visual Studio Team Services is more suitable for smaller teams and projects, with a limited scalability compared to Ansible.
Infrastructure Management: Ansible focuses on infrastructure-as-code, enabling users to automate the management of their infrastructure. It provides a declarative approach where users define the desired state of their infrastructure. In contrast, Visual Studio Team Services primarily focuses on software development and collaboration, with less emphasis on infrastructure management.
Integration with CI/CD: Visual Studio Team Services offers seamless integration with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. It provides comprehensive functionalities for building, testing, and deploying applications. In comparison, while Ansible can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines, it primarily focuses on orchestration and automation rather than providing dedicated CI/CD capabilities.
Agent-based vs Agentless: Ansible follows an agentless architecture, whereby it utilizes SSH or WinRM connections to manage remote systems. This reduces the overhead of installing and maintaining agents on each target system. Conversely, Visual Studio Team Services relies on agents for executing tasks on remote machines, which requires the installation and configuration of these agents.
Platform Support: Ansible has broader platform support, enabling it to manage a wide range of operating systems, cloud platforms, and networking devices. It offers native support for various platforms, including Linux, Windows, VMware, AWS, Azure, and more. In contrast, Visual Studio Team Services primarily focuses on Windows-based platforms and provides limited support for other operating systems and cloud providers.
Open-source vs Proprietary: Ansible is an open-source tool, which means it is freely available, transparent, and benefits from a vibrant community of contributors. Users can modify and customize Ansible to fit their specific needs. In contrast, Visual Studio Team Services is a proprietary tool offered by Microsoft, which comes with licensing costs and may have limitations on customization.
In summary, Ansible is focused on automation and configuration management, providing flexibility across various environments, while Visual Studio Team Services (Azure DevOps) is a broader DevOps platform, offering a suite of integrated tools for end-to-end application lifecycle management.
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.
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.
Azure DevOps provides unlimited private Git hosting, cloud build for continuous integration, agile planning, and release management for continuous delivery to the cloud and on-premises. Includes broad IDE support.
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.
Agile Tools: kanban boards, backlogs, scrum boards;
Reporting: dashboards, widgets, Power BI;
Git: free private repositories, pull requests;
Continuous Integration: automated builds and diagnostics;
Cloud build agents: cross-platform agents for Windows, Mac and Linux;
Testing Tools: unit testing, load testing, manual, exploratory and user acceptance testing;
Release Management: automate deployments, gated approval workflows, audit trails;
Marketplace: extensions for the Visual Studio family of products;
Package Management: host npm and NuGet packages;
IDE Support: Eclipse, IntelliJ, Xcode and Visual Studio;
Integration: link code and releases to work items, builds, and test results
Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
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GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
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Stacks
19.3K
Stacks
2.8K
Followers
15.6K
Followers
2.9K
Votes
1.3K
Votes
249
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
56
Complete and powerful
32
Huge extension ecosystem
27
Azure integration
26
One Stop Shop For Build server, Project Mgt, CDCI
26
Flexible and powerful
Cons
8
Still dependant on C# for agents
5
Many in devops disregard MS altogether
5
Half Baked
4
Jack of all trades, master of none
4
Capacity across cross functional teams not visibile
