Ansible vs Bazel

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Bazel

Stacks314

Followers579

Votes133

Ansible vs Bazel: What are the differences?

Packaging and Deployment: Ansible focuses on configuration management and automation of software deployment while Bazel is a software build tool that emphasizes on code compilation, testing, and packaging.
Language Support: Ansible uses YAML for defining tasks and playbooks, making it straightforward for configuration management, whereas Bazel supports multiple programming languages, providing flexibility for different project requirements.
Workflow Integration: Ansible offers integration with various IT automation tools and systems to enable a seamless workflow, while Bazel centralizes building and testing processes to streamline the development workflow.
Scalability: Ansible is suitable for managing configurations across numerous servers efficiently. In contrast, Bazel is designed for large-scale software projects with a focus on build speed and reproducibility.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a broad community and a vast collection of modules for various tasks, making it easier to leverage pre-existing solutions. On the other hand, Bazel has a growing community and a strong ecosystem that supports a wide range of programming languages and tools.
Use Cases: Anisble is ideal for automating repetitive tasks, configurations, and deployments in IT environments, while Bazel is best suited for large software projects requiring efficient build processes and dependency management.

In Summary, Ansible and Bazel differ in their focus on packaging and deployment, language support, workflow integration, scalability, community, and ecosystem, as well as use cases.

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Advice on Ansible, Bazel

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	Bazel
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.	Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.
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.	Multi-language support: Bazel supports Java, Objective-C and C++ out of the box, and can be extended to support arbitrary programming languages;High-level build language: Projects are described in the BUILD language, a concise text format that describes a project as sets of small interconnected libraries, binaries and tests. By contrast, with tools like Make you have to describe individual files and compiler invocations;Multi-platform support: The same tool and the same BUILD files can be used to build software for different architectures, and even different platforms. At Google, we use Bazel to build both server applications running on systems in our data centers and client apps running on mobile phones;Reproducibility: In BUILD files, each library, test, and binary must specify its direct dependencies completely. Bazel uses this dependency information to know what must be rebuilt when you make changes to a source file, and which tasks can run in parallel. This means that all builds are incremental and will always produce the same result;Scalable: Bazel can handle large builds
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 314
Followers 15.6K	Followers 579
Votes 1.3K	Votes 133
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility 3 Doesn't Run on Windows	Pros 28 Fast 20 Deterministic incremental builds 17 Correct 16 Multi-language 14 Enforces declared inputs/outputs Cons 3 No Windows Support 2 Bad IntelliJ support 1 Learning Curve 1 Constant breaking changes 1 Poor windows support for some languages
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Java Objective-C C++

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Bazel?

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

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.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

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

Pants

Pants is a build system for Java, Scala and Python. It works particularly well for a source code repository that contains many distinct projects.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Bazel: What are the differences?

Packaging and Deployment: Ansible focuses on configuration management and automation of software deployment while Bazel is a software build tool that emphasizes on code compilation, testing, and packaging.
Language Support: Ansible uses YAML for defining tasks and playbooks, making it straightforward for configuration management, whereas Bazel supports multiple programming languages, providing flexibility for different project requirements.
Workflow Integration: Ansible offers integration with various IT automation tools and systems to enable a seamless workflow, while Bazel centralizes building and testing processes to streamline the development workflow.
Scalability: Ansible is suitable for managing configurations across numerous servers efficiently. In contrast, Bazel is designed for large-scale software projects with a focus on build speed and reproducibility.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a broad community and a vast collection of modules for various tasks, making it easier to leverage pre-existing solutions. On the other hand, Bazel has a growing community and a strong ecosystem that supports a wide range of programming languages and tools.
Use Cases: Anisble is ideal for automating repetitive tasks, configurations, and deployments in IT environments, while Bazel is best suited for large software projects requiring efficient build processes and dependency management.

In Summary, Ansible and Bazel differ in their focus on packaging and deployment, language support, workflow integration, scalability, community, and ecosystem, as well as use cases.

Ansible vs Bazel

Overview