Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

Ansible

19.1K
15.4K
+ 1
1.3K
CloudSlang

1
4
+ 1
0
Add tool

Ansible vs CloudSlang: What are the differences?

Developers describe Ansible as "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. On the other hand, CloudSlang is detailed as "An open source tool for orchestrating cutting edge technologies". It can orchestrate anything you can imagine in an agentless manner. You can use or customize ready-made YAML based workflows. They are powerful, shareable and human readable. Modernize your IT with it.

Ansible and CloudSlang can be primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" tools.

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, CloudSlang provides the following key features:

  • Process based
  • Ready-made content
  • Agentless

Ansible and CloudSlang are both open source tools. Ansible with 39.4K GitHub stars and 16.8K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than CloudSlang with 195 GitHub stars and 70 GitHub forks.

Advice on Ansible and CloudSlang
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

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.

See more
Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

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.

See more
Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

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

See more
Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
Learn More
Pros of Ansible
Pros of CloudSlang
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
  • 69
    Flexible
  • 55
    Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
  • 35
    Makes sense
  • 30
    Super efficient and flexible
  • 27
    Powerful
  • 11
    Dynamic Inventory
  • 9
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 6
    Cloud Oriented
  • 6
    Easy to maintain
  • 4
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 4
    Simple and powerful
  • 4
    Multi language
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Because SSH
  • 4
    Procedural or declarative, or both
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Consistency
  • 2
    Well-documented
  • 2
    Masterless
  • 2
    Debugging is simple
  • 2
    Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
  • 2
    Fast as hell
  • 1
    Manage any OS
  • 1
    Work on windows, but difficult to manage
  • 1
    Certified Content
    Be the first to leave a pro

    Sign up to add or upvote prosMake informed product decisions

    Cons of Ansible
    Cons of CloudSlang
    • 8
      Dangerous
    • 5
      Hard to install
    • 3
      Doesn't Run on Windows
    • 3
      Bloated
    • 3
      Backward compatibility
    • 2
      No immutable infrastructure
      Be the first to leave a con

      Sign up to add or upvote consMake informed product decisions

      What is Ansible?

      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 CloudSlang?

      It can orchestrate anything you can imagine in an agentless manner. You can use or customize ready-made YAML based workflows. They are powerful, shareable and human readable. Modernize your IT with it

      Need advice about which tool to choose?Ask the StackShare community!

      What companies use Ansible?
      What companies use CloudSlang?
      Manage your open source components, licenses, and vulnerabilities
      Learn More

      Sign up to get full access to all the companiesMake informed product decisions

      What tools integrate with Ansible?
      What tools integrate with CloudSlang?

      Sign up to get full access to all the tool integrationsMake informed product decisions

      Blog Posts

      PythonDockerKubernetes+14
      12
      2658
      GitGitHubSlack+30
      27
      18713
      JavaScriptGitGitHub+33
      20
      2146
      GitHubDockerAmazon EC2+23
      12
      6617
      JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
      53
      22181
      What are some alternatives to Ansible and CloudSlang?
      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.
      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.
      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.
      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.
      Jenkins
      In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
      See all alternatives