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  1. Stackups
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  3. Infrastructure as a Service
  4. Server Software
  5. Ansible vs Bitnami

Ansible vs Bitnami

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Bitnami
Bitnami
Stacks139
Followers221
Votes6
Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K

Ansible vs Bitnami: What are the differences?

What is 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.

What is Bitnami? The App Store for Server Software. Our library provides trusted virtual machines for every major development stack and open source server application, ready to run in your infrastructure.

Ansible can be classified as a tool in the "Server Configuration and Automation" category, while Bitnami is grouped under "Server Software".

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, Bitnami provides the following key features:

  • BitNami Cloud Hosting lets you instantly run every BitNami package you already know and love and have it automatically configured, backed up and monitored.
  • Launch applications to the cloud with one click.
  • Choose from 50 popular open source applications, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Drupal, WordPress, Redmine, JasperServer, Joomla! and many more.

"Agentless" is the top reason why over 251 developers like Ansible, while over 2 developers mention "Cloud Management" as the leading cause for choosing Bitnami.

Ansible is an open source tool with 37.8K GitHub stars and 15.8K GitHub forks. Here's a link to Ansible's open source repository on GitHub.

DigitalOcean, 9GAG, and Hootsuite are some of the popular companies that use Ansible, whereas Bitnami is used by CameraLends, Mark & Phil, and Devotee. Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 955 company stacks & 578 developers stacks; compared to Bitnami, which is listed in 9 company stacks and 13 developer stacks.

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Advice on Bitnami, Ansible

Anonymous
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.

329k views329k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Bitnami
Bitnami
Ansible
Ansible

Our library provides trusted virtual machines for every major development stack and open source server application, ready to run in your infrastructure.

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.

BitNami Cloud Hosting lets you instantly run every BitNami package you already know and love and have it automatically configured, backed up and monitored.;Launch applications to the cloud with one click.;Choose from 50 popular open source applications, including SugarCRM, Alfresco, Drupal, WordPress, Redmine, JasperServer, Joomla! and many more.;By launching a server without adding any applications to it, you get a ready-to-run development environment that includes Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Ruby, Python, Django, Memcached, Nginx, Subversion, Git, Sqlite, Tomcat and Java.;Run multiple applications on one server and save money by sharing the resources of a larger machine between applications.;Manage multiple Amazon Web Services accounts from one dashboard.;BitNami Cloud Hosting is powered by Amazon, the global leader in Cloud Computing.;Use BitNami Cloud Hosting to schedule weekly, daily or even hourly automatic backups. Backups are complete, incremental snapshots of your server.;Restore a complete, ready-to-run copy of your server, with all of your data and customizations, in one click.;Server scheduling enables you to specify times for your servers to automatically turn on and off.
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.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Forks
-
GitHub Forks
24.1K
Stacks
139
Stacks
19.5K
Followers
221
Followers
15.6K
Votes
6
Votes
1.3K
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 6
    Cloud Management
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
Integrations
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Google Kubernetes Engine
Docker
Docker
HP Cloud Compute
HP Cloud Compute
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Microsoft Azure
Microsoft Azure
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty

What are some alternatives to Bitnami, Ansible?

Chef

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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