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Ansible vs CircleCI: What are the differences?
Introduction
Ansible and CircleCI are both popular tools used in the field of DevOps. While both tools are used for automation, there are key differences that set them apart.
Deployment Orchestration vs Continuous Integration: Ansible is primarily used for deployment orchestration and configuration management. It allows for defining infrastructure as code and automating the deployment process. On the other hand, CircleCI is a continuous integration platform that enables teams to automate the build, test, and deployment processes of their applications.
Infrastructure Provisioning vs Cloud-native CI/CD: Ansible focuses on infrastructure provisioning, allowing the management of servers, networks, and storage components. It provides a way to define and maintain infrastructure using code. In contrast, CircleCI is a cloud-native CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment) tool that is hosted in the cloud. It simplifies the build, test, and deployment pipelines for applications.
Agentless vs Agent-based: Ansible is an agentless tool, meaning it does not require any software to be installed on the target server. It connects to remote servers using SSH and executes tasks using modules on the server. Conversely, CircleCI uses agents (known as "executors") to perform the necessary tasks. These agents need to be installed on the target environment for CircleCI to work.
Playbook-based vs Configuration file and pipeline: Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define automation tasks. Playbooks can be used to configure and manage systems, deploy applications, and perform various other tasks. CircleCI, on the other hand, relies on a configuration file (usually written in YAML) and a pipeline setup. The configuration file defines the steps for the build and deployment process, while the pipeline specifies the order and conditions for executing these steps.
Broad range of features vs Focus on CI/CD: Ansible offers a wide range of features, including but not limited to configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. It is a versatile tool that can be used across various aspects of infrastructure management. In contrast, CircleCI focuses specifically on CI/CD processes and provides a set of features tailored to this purpose, such as build automation, testing, and deployment tasks.
Community Support and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community with a wide range of available modules and plugins. It also integrates well with other tools commonly used in the DevOps ecosystem, such as Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS. CircleCI also has an active community, but it has a more specialized focus on CI/CD tasks. It integrates well with popular version control systems like GitHub and Bitbucket and has a marketplace for extensions and integrations.
In Summary, Ansible is used for infrastructure provisioning and deployment orchestration, while CircleCI is a cloud-native CI/CD platform focused on automating the build, test, and deployment processes for applications. Ansible is agentless and uses YAML-based playbooks, while CircleCI uses agents and relies on configuration files and pipelines for defining automation steps. Ansible offers a broad range of features for various aspects of infrastructure management, while CircleCI focuses specifically on CI/CD tasks. Both tools have active communities and integrations with other tools commonly used in the DevOps ecosystem.
We are a mid-size startup running Scala apps. Moving from Jenkins/EC2 to Spinnaker/EKS and looking for a tool to cover our CI/CD needs. Our code lives on GitHub, artifacts in nexus, images in ECR.
Drone is out, GitHub actions are being considered along with Circle CI and GitLab CI.
We primarily need:
- Fast SBT builds (caching)
- Low maintenance overhead (ideally serverless)
- Everything as code
- Ease of use
I think I've tried most of the CI tools out there at some point. It took me a while to get around to Buildkite because at first I didn't see much point given it seemed like you had to run the agent yourself. Eventually it dawned on me why this approach was more ingenious than I realised:
Running my app in a production (or production-like) environment was already a solved problem, because everything was already in some form of "everything as code". Having a test environment where the only difference was adding the Buildkite agent was a trivial addition.
It means that dev/test/prod parity is simple to achieve and maintain. It's also proven to be much easier to support than trying to deal with the problems that come with trying to force an app to fit into the nuances and constraints that are imposed by the containers/runtime of a CI service. When you completely control all of the environment the tests are running in you define those constraints too. It's been a great balance between a managed service and the flexibility of running it yourself.
And while none of my needs have hit the scale of Shopify (I saw one of their engineers speak about it at a conference once, I can't find the video now though 😞) it's good to know I can scale out my worker nodes to hundreds of thousands of workers to reduce the time it takes for my tests to run.
I would recommend you to consider the JFrog Platform that includes JFrog Pipelines - it will allow you to manage the full artifact life cycle for your sbt, docker and other technologies, and automate all of your CI and CD using cloud native declarative yaml pipelines. Will integrate smoothly with all your other toolset.
more configurable to setup ci/cd: * It can provide caching when build sbt, just add this section to yml file * Easy to use, many documentation
Weakness: * Need use gitlab as repository to bring more powerful configuration
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
From a StackShare Community member: "Currently we use Travis CI and have optimized it as much as we can so our builds are fairly quick. Our boss is all about redundancy so we are looking for another solution to fall back on in case Travis goes down and/or jacks prices way up (they were recently acquired). Could someone recommend which CI we should go with and if they have time, an explanation of how they're different?"
We use CircleCI because of the better value it provides in its plans. I'm sure we could have used Travis just as easily but we found CircleCI's pricing to be more reasonable. In the two years since we signed up, the service has improved. CircleCI is always innovating and iterating on their platform. We have been very satisfied.
As the maintainer of the Karate DSL open-source project - I found Travis CI very easy to integrate into the GitHub workflow and it has been steady sailing for more than 2 years now ! It works well for Java / Apache Maven projects and we were able to configure it to use the latest Oracle JDK as per our needs. Thanks to the Travis CI team for this service to the open-source community !
I use Google Cloud Build because it's my first foray into the CICD world(loving it so far), and I wanted to work with something GCP native to avoid giving permissions to other SaaS tools like CircleCI and Travis CI.
I really like it because it's free for the first 120 minutes, and it's one of the few CICD tools that enterprises are open to using since it's contained within GCP.
One of the unique things is that it has the Kaniko cache, which speeds up builds by creating intermediate layers within the docker image vs. pushing the full thing from the start. Helpful when you're installing just a few additional dependencies.
Feel free to checkout an example: Cloudbuild Example
I use Travis CI because of various reasons - 1. Cloud based system so no dedicated server required, and you do not need to administrate it. 2. Easy YAML configuration. 3. Supports Major Programming Languages. 4. Support of build matrix 6. Supports AWS, Azure, Docker, Heroku, Google Cloud, Github Pages, PyPi and lot more. 7. Slack Notifications.
You are probably looking at another hosted solution: Jenkins is a good tool but it way too work intensive to be used as just a backup solution.
I have good experience with Circle-CI, Codeship, Drone.io and Travis (as well as problematic experiences with all of them), but my go-to tool is Gitlab CI: simple, powerful and if you have problems with their limitations or pricing, you can always install runners somewhere and use Gitlab just for scheduling and management. Even if you don't host your git repository at Gitlab, you can have Gitlab pull changes automatically from wherever you repo lives.
If you are considering Jenkins I would recommend at least checking out Buildkite. The agents are self-hosted (like Jenkins) but the interface is hosted for you. It meshes up some of the things I like about hosted services (pipeline definitions in YAML, managed interface and authentication) with things I like about Jenkins (local customizable agent images, secrets only on own instances, custom agent level scripts, sizing instances to your needs).
My website is brand new and one of the few requirements of testings I had to implement was code coverage. Never though it was so hard to implement using a #docker container.
Given my lack of experience, every attempt I tried on making a simple code coverage test using the 4 combinations of #TravisCI, #CircleCi with #Coveralls, #Codecov I failed. The main problem was I was generating the .coverage
file within the docker container and couldn't access it with #TravisCi or #CircleCi, every attempt to solve this problem seems to be very hacky and this was not the kind of complexity I want to introduce to my newborn website.
This problem was solved using a specific action for #GitHubActions, it was a 3 line solution I had to put in my github workflow file and I was able to access the .coverage
file from my docker container and get the coverage report with #Codecov.
Buddy is one of the most easy-to-use tools for CI I ever met. When I needed to set up the pipeline I was really impressed with how easy it is to create it with Buddy with only a few moments. It's literally like: 1. Add repo 2. Click - Click - Click 3. You're done and your app is on prod :D The top feature that I've found is a simple integration with different notification channels - not only Slack (which is the one by default), but Telegram and Discord. The support is also neat - guys respond pretty quickly on even a small issue.
We were long time users of TravisCI, but switched to CircleCI because of the better user interface and pricing. Version 2.0 has had a couple of trips and hiccups; but overall we've been very happy with the continuous integration it provides. Continuous Integration is a must-have for building software, and CircleCI continues to surprise as they roll out ideas and features. It's leading the industry in terms of innovation and new ideas, and it's exciting to see what new things they keep rolling out.
Jenkins is a pretty flexible, complete tool. Especially I love the possibility to configure jobs as a code with Jenkins pipelines.
CircleCI is well suited for small projects where the main task is to run continuous integration as quickly as possible. Travis CI is recommended primarily for open-source projects that need to be tested in different environments.
And for something a bit larger I prefer to use Jenkins because it is possible to make serious system configuration thereby different plugins. In Jenkins, I can change almost anything. But if you want to start the CI chain as soon as possible, Jenkins may not be the right choice.
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 CircleCI
- Github integration226
- Easy setup177
- Fast builds153
- Competitively priced94
- Slack integration74
- Docker support55
- Awesome UI45
- Great customer support33
- Ios support18
- Hipchat integration14
- SSH debug access13
- Free for Open Source11
- Mobile support6
- Nodejs support5
- Bitbucket integration5
- YAML configuration5
- AWS CodeDeploy integration4
- Free for Github private repo3
- Great support3
- Clojurescript2
- Continuous Deployment2
- Parallelism2
- Clojure2
- OSX support2
- Simple, clean UI2
- Unstable1
- Ci1
- Favorite1
- Helpful documentation1
- Autoscaling1
- Extremely configurable1
- Works1
- Android support1
- Fair pricing1
- All inclusive testing1
- Japanese in rspec comment appears OK1
- Build PR Branch Only1
- So circular1
- Easy setup, easy to understand, fast and reliable1
- Parallel builds for slow test suites1
- Easy setup. 2.0 is fast!1
- Easy to deploy to private servers1
- Really easy to use1
- Stable0
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of CircleCI
- Unstable12
- Scammy pricing structure6
- Aggressive Github permissions0