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Ansible vs Concourse: What are the differences?
Architecture: Ansible follows a push configuration model where the control node pushes configurations to the managed nodes, while Concourse follows a pull-based model where agents on worker nodes pull task definitions from the Concourse server.
Purpose: Ansible is primarily used for configuration management and task automation, making it suitable for managing infrastructure and deploying applications, whereas Concourse is designed specifically for continuous integration and continuous deployment pipelines that automate the build, test, and deployment processes.
Language: Ansible uses YAML for writing playbooks, which are human-readable files defining tasks to be executed on managed nodes, while Concourse uses a domain-specific language called Concourse Pipeline Configurations for defining pipelines, making it more tailored for CI/CD workflows.
Extensibility: Ansible provides a wide range of modules and plugins to extend its functionality and integrate with various tools and platforms, enabling users to customize their automation workflows, whereas Concourse focuses on its pipeline structure, limiting flexibility in customization outside of the defined pipeline constructs.
Community Support: Ansible has a large and active community, offering extensive documentation, modules, and support resources that cater to a broad user base, while Concourse, although with a smaller community, provides focused support and resources for users looking specifically for CI/CD automation solutions.
Ease of Use: Ansible's agentless nature simplifies setup and configuration, requiring minimal dependencies on managed nodes, making it easy to get started with automation tasks quickly, compared to Concourse that requires setting up and managing Concourse workers and pipelines, which can be more complex for beginners.
In Summary, Ansible is a versatile tool suitable for various automation tasks and configuration management, whereas Concourse is specialized in CI/CD pipeline automation tailored for software development workflows.
I'm planning to setup complete CD-CD setup for spark and python application which we are going to deploy in aws lambda and EMR Cluster. Which tool would be best one to choose. Since my company is trying to adopt to concourse i would like to understand what are the lack of capabilities concourse have . Thanks in advance !
I would definetly recommend Concourse to you, as it is one of the most advanced modern methods of making CI/CD while Jenkins is an old monolithic dinosaur. Concourse itself is cloudnative and containerbased which helps you to build simple, high-performance and scalable CI/CD pipelines. In my opinion, the only lack of skills you have with Concourse is your own knowledge of how to build pipelines and automate things. Technincally there is no lack, i would even say you can extend it way more easily. But as a Con it is more easy to interact with Jenkins if you are only used to UIs. Concourse needs someone which is capable of using CLIs.
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 Concourse
- Real pipelines16
- Containerised builds10
- Flexible engine9
- Fast6
- Open source4
- No Snowflakes3
- Simple configuration management3
- You have to do everything2
- Fancy Visualization1
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Concourse
- Fail forward instead of rollback pattern2