Ansible vs Consul

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Consul

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.5K

Votes213

GitHub Stars29.5K

Forks4.5K

Ansible vs Consul: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and Consul are both widely used tools in the field of infrastructure automation and management. While they serve common purposes, there are key differences between them that make them suitable for different scenarios. Below, we explore and outline the significant distinctions between Ansible and Consul.

Configuration Management vs Service Discovery:
- Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on automating the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of infrastructure resources and applications. It enables organizations to define the desired state of their systems and ensures that it is consistently maintained.
- On the other hand, Consul is a service discovery tool that aids in service registration, health checking, and the dynamic discovery of services within a distributed system. It helps maintain an up-to-date catalog of services and their health status.
Push vs Pull Approach:
- Ansible follows a push-based approach, where the controller node pushes the configuration and management instructions to the target nodes. This means that the controller takes the initiative and actively executes the necessary actions on the remote systems.
- Conversely, Consul utilizes a pull-based approach, where agents running on the target nodes periodically pull and sync the required information from the Consul servers. This approach allows the target nodes to decide when and how to fetch the information.
Language and Execution Model:
- Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define the desired state and the necessary tasks. It supports both imperative and declarative styles of programming. Ansible playbooks are executed in a sequential manner, making troubleshooting and debugging relatively straightforward.
- Consul, on the other hand, provides a platform-agnostic API and uses a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to configure its services. It follows a declarative execution model, where the desired state is defined, and Consul handles the implementation details.
Use Cases:
- Ansible is widely used for managing and configuring servers, deploying applications, and orchestrating complex workflows. Its strength lies in infrastructure automation and the application of configuration changes across multiple systems at once.
- Consul, on the other hand, is mainly used for service discovery, health checking, and distributed systems coordination. It excels in scenarios where service communication and fault-tolerance are critical, such as microservices-based architectures or multi-cloud environments.
Community and Ecosystem:
- Ansible has a large and vibrant community, with extensive documentation, a wide range of pre-built modules, and numerous contributed playbooks. Its popularity has fostered a rich ecosystem and integrations with various tools and platforms.
- Consul also has an active community, but its focus is specific to service discovery and related functionalities. Consul integrates seamlessly with other HashiCorp tools, such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad, creating a comprehensive stack for infrastructure provisioning and management.
Scalability and Performance:
- Ansible is scalable to hundreds or thousands of nodes, but as the number of target nodes increases, the overall performance might start to degrade due to the nature of its push-based approach.
- Consul is designed to scale to large and complex distributed systems, allowing the discovery of services and configurations efficiently. Its pull-based approach ensures that the target nodes fetch the necessary information only when required, leading to better performance in highly dynamic environments.

In summary, Ansible focuses on configuration management and automation, utilizing a push approach and providing a diverse range of use cases, while Consul specializes in service discovery, employing a pull approach and excelling in distributed system coordination.

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Advice on Ansible, Consul

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

Ansible	Consul
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.	Consul is a tool for service discovery and configuration. Consul is distributed, highly available, and extremely scalable.
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.	Service Discovery - Consul makes it simple for services to register themselves and to discover other services via a DNS or HTTP interface. External services such as SaaS providers can be registered as well.;Health Checking - Health Checking enables Consul to quickly alert operators about any issues in a cluster. The integration with service discovery prevents routing traffic to unhealthy hosts and enables service level circuit breakers.;Key/Value Storage - A flexible key/value store enables storing dynamic configuration, feature flagging, coordination, leader election and more. The simple HTTP API makes it easy to use anywhere.;Multi-Datacenter - Consul is built to be datacenter aware, and can support any number of regions without complex configuration.
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars 29.5K
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 4.5K
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 15.6K	Followers 1.5K
Votes 1.3K	Votes 213
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Backward compatibility 3 Bloated 3 Doesn't Run on Windows	Pros 61 Great service discovery infrastructure 35 Health checking 29 Distributed key-value store 26 Monitoring 23 High-availability
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Consul?

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

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 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 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 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 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.

Eureka

Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers.

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

Zookeeper

A centralized service for maintaining configuration information, naming, providing distributed synchronization, and providing group services. All of these kinds of services are used in some form or another by distributed applications.

etcd

etcd is a distributed key value store that provides a reliable way to store data across a cluster of machines. It’s open-source and available on GitHub. etcd gracefully handles master elections during network partitions and will tolerate machine failure, including the master.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Consul: What are the differences?

Introduction

Configuration Management vs Service Discovery:
- Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on automating the provisioning, configuration, and deployment of infrastructure resources and applications. It enables organizations to define the desired state of their systems and ensures that it is consistently maintained.
- On the other hand, Consul is a service discovery tool that aids in service registration, health checking, and the dynamic discovery of services within a distributed system. It helps maintain an up-to-date catalog of services and their health status.
Push vs Pull Approach:
- Ansible follows a push-based approach, where the controller node pushes the configuration and management instructions to the target nodes. This means that the controller takes the initiative and actively executes the necessary actions on the remote systems.
- Conversely, Consul utilizes a pull-based approach, where agents running on the target nodes periodically pull and sync the required information from the Consul servers. This approach allows the target nodes to decide when and how to fetch the information.
Language and Execution Model:
- Ansible uses YAML-based playbooks to define the desired state and the necessary tasks. It supports both imperative and declarative styles of programming. Ansible playbooks are executed in a sequential manner, making troubleshooting and debugging relatively straightforward.
- Consul, on the other hand, provides a platform-agnostic API and uses a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to configure its services. It follows a declarative execution model, where the desired state is defined, and Consul handles the implementation details.
Use Cases:
- Ansible is widely used for managing and configuring servers, deploying applications, and orchestrating complex workflows. Its strength lies in infrastructure automation and the application of configuration changes across multiple systems at once.
- Consul, on the other hand, is mainly used for service discovery, health checking, and distributed systems coordination. It excels in scenarios where service communication and fault-tolerance are critical, such as microservices-based architectures or multi-cloud environments.
Community and Ecosystem:
- Ansible has a large and vibrant community, with extensive documentation, a wide range of pre-built modules, and numerous contributed playbooks. Its popularity has fostered a rich ecosystem and integrations with various tools and platforms.
- Consul also has an active community, but its focus is specific to service discovery and related functionalities. Consul integrates seamlessly with other HashiCorp tools, such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad, creating a comprehensive stack for infrastructure provisioning and management.
Scalability and Performance:
- Ansible is scalable to hundreds or thousands of nodes, but as the number of target nodes increases, the overall performance might start to degrade due to the nature of its push-based approach.
- Consul is designed to scale to large and complex distributed systems, allowing the discovery of services and configurations efficiently. Its pull-based approach ensures that the target nodes fetch the necessary information only when required, leading to better performance in highly dynamic environments.

Ansible vs Consul

Overview

Ansible vs Consul: What are the differences?