StackShareStackShare
Follow on
StackShare

Discover and share technology stacks from companies around the world.

Follow on

© 2025 StackShare. All rights reserved.

Product

  • Stacks
  • Tools
  • Feed

Company

  • About
  • Contact

Legal

  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms of Service
  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Ansible vs DC/OS

Ansible vs DC/OS

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.6K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K
DC/OS
DC/OS
Stacks109
Followers180
Votes12
GitHub Stars2.4K
Forks488

Ansible vs DC/OS: What are the differences?

  1. Architecture: Ansible follows an agentless architecture where it does not require any agent to be installed on the target system, making it lightweight and easier to set up. On the other hand, DC/OS involves a more complex architecture with multiple components like Mesos, Marathon, and more, which require careful configuration and management.
  2. Scope: Ansible focuses on automation and configuration management tasks, allowing users to define tasks in playbooks and execute them on multiple servers simultaneously. In contrast, DC/OS is a distributed operating system that aims to abstract the infrastructure and manage applications in a containerized environment, providing scalability and resource efficiency.
  3. Community Support: Ansible has a large and active community that continuously contributes playbooks, roles, and modules, making it easier for users to automate various tasks and integrate with other tools. DC/OS, on the other hand, has a more specialized community focused on container orchestration and distributed systems, providing support for running microservices at scale.
  4. Learning Curve: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it accessible to beginners and experienced users alike with its declarative YAML syntax. In contrast, DC/OS has a steeper learning curve due to its distributed system architecture and the need to understand concepts like Mesos, Marathon, and container orchestration.
  5. Use Cases: Ansible is widely used for configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration across various environments, including cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups. On the other hand, DC/OS is specifically designed for managing containerized workloads at scale, making it ideal for organizations running microservices or containerized applications.
  6. Scalability: Ansible is suitable for managing small to medium-sized infrastructures efficiently due to its agentless nature and simplicity, while DC/OS is built for scalability and can handle large clusters of nodes running containerized applications, providing features like service discovery, load balancing, and fault tolerance.

In Summary, Ansible and DC/OS differ in architecture, scope, community support, learning curve, use cases, and scalability.

Share your Stack

Help developers discover the tools you use. Get visibility for your team's tech choices and contribute to the community's knowledge.

View Docs
CLI (Node.js)
or
Manual

Advice on Ansible, DC/OS

Anonymous
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
Ansible
DC/OS
DC/OS

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.

Unlike traditional operating systems, DC/OS spans multiple machines within a network, aggregating their resources to maximize utilization by distributed applications.

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.
High Resource Utilization;Mixed Workload Colocation;Container Orchestration;Resource Isolation;Stateful Storage;Package Repositories;Public Cloud;Private Cloud;On-Premise;Command Line Interface;Web Interface;Elastic Scalability;High Availability;Zero Downtime Upgrades;Service Discovery;Load Balancing;Production-Ready
Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
2.4K
GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
488
Stacks
19.6K
Stacks
109
Followers
15.6K
Followers
180
Votes
1.3K
Votes
12
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
Cons
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
Pros
  • 5
    Easy to setup a HA cluster
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Has templates to install via AWS and Azure
  • 1
    Easy to get services running and operate them
  • 1
    Easy Setup
Integrations
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
Apache Mesos
Apache Mesos

What are some alternatives to Ansible, DC/OS?

Chef

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

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

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 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

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

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.

AWS OpsWorks

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

Nomad

Nomad

Nomad is a cluster manager, designed for both long lived services and short lived batch processing workloads. Developers use a declarative job specification to submit work, and Nomad ensures constraints are satisfied and resource utilization is optimized by efficient task packing. Nomad supports all major operating systems and virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications.

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos

Apache Mesos is a cluster manager that simplifies the complexity of running applications on a shared pool of servers.

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Related Comparisons

GitHub
Bitbucket

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

GitHub
Bitbucket

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Kubernetes
Rancher

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

gulp
Grunt

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Graphite
Kibana

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana