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Ansible vs CFEngine: What are the differences?
Comparison between Ansible and CFEngine
Introduction
This article compares Ansible and CFEngine, two widely used configuration management tools, highlighting their key differences.
- Architecture and Configuration Language: Ansible is agentless and uses a simple YAML-based configuration language, whereas CFEngine relies on a client-server architecture and uses its own specialized language called CFEngine Policy Language (CFL).
- Ease of Use: Ansible focuses on simplicity and ease of use, providing a low learning curve with its declarative approach. CFEngine, on the other hand, offers a more complex and powerful configuration language, making it better suited for experienced system administrators.
- Community and Ecosystem: Ansible boasts a large and active community with extensive online resources and a wide range of pre-built modules and playbooks available. CFEngine, although not as popular as Ansible, still has an active community, but with a smaller ecosystem.
- Scalability: Ansible is designed to handle large-scale distributed environments with ease, making it an ideal choice for complex infrastructures. CFEngine, with its distributed architecture, can also handle large-scale environments efficiently, ensuring consistent configurations across different systems.
- Real-Time Monitoring: CFEngine offers real-time monitoring capabilities, providing continuous feedback on system configuration changes and compliance. Ansible, however, requires the use of separate monitoring tools for real-time tracking and verification of configurations.
- Agentless vs. Agent-Based: One of the key differences is that Ansible is agentless, meaning it does not require any software to be installed on managed machines. CFEngine, on the other hand, relies on agents that need to be installed on each managed machine.
In Summary, Ansible and CFEngine differ in their architecture, configuration language, ease of use, community support, scalability, monitoring capabilities, and agent-based vs. agentless approach.
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.
I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Pros of Ansible
- Agentless284
- Great configuration210
- Simple199
- Powerful176
- Easy to learn155
- Flexible69
- Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done55
- Makes sense35
- Super efficient and flexible30
- Powerful27
- Dynamic Inventory11
- Backed by Red Hat9
- Works with AWS7
- Cloud Oriented6
- Easy to maintain6
- Vagrant provisioner4
- Simple and powerful4
- Multi language4
- Simple4
- Because SSH4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Easy4
- Consistency3
- Well-documented2
- Masterless2
- Debugging is simple2
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Fast as hell2
- Manage any OS1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
- Certified Content1
Pros of CFEngine
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of CFEngine
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