Ansible vs InSpec

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

InSpec

Stacks336

Followers49

Votes0

GitHub Stars3.0K

Forks683

Ansible vs InSpec: What are the differences?

Introduction

In today's digital era, automation plays a pivotal role in managing and maintaining infrastructure. Two popular tools that are widely used for automation are Ansible and InSpec. While both Ansible and InSpec are used for infrastructure automation, there are significant differences between the two.

Language Ansible is written in Python, while InSpec is written in Ruby. This difference in programming languages can impact the ease of use and level of customization for users.
Configuration Management vs Compliance Testing One of the key differences between Ansible and InSpec is their primary focus. Ansible is mainly used as a configuration management tool, enabling administrators to define and manage the desired state of their infrastructure, while InSpec is primarily used for compliance testing, allowing users to assess whether their infrastructure meets certain security or regulatory standards.
Declarative vs Imperative Ansible follows a declarative approach, where users define the desired end state and the tool automatically handles the implementation. In contrast, InSpec follows an imperative approach, where users need to explicitly define each step in the testing process. This difference in approach can impact the learning curve and the complexity of writing automation scripts.
Agentless vs Agent-based Another significant difference between Ansible and InSpec is their approach to managing nodes. Ansible is an agentless tool, meaning it doesn't require any software to be installed on managed nodes. On the other hand, InSpec relies on agents that need to be installed and configured on each managed node. This can influence the ease of setup and the level of control over the managed nodes.
Scope of Automation Ansible is a versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of automation tasks, including configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. In contrast, InSpec is primarily focused on compliance testing and reporting, with a narrower scope of automation.
Integration with CI/CD Ansible is often integrated into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline, facilitating the automation of infrastructure provisioning and configuration. InSpec, on the other hand, is commonly used for security and compliance testing within the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring the infrastructure meets the required standards.

In summary, Ansible and InSpec differ in terms of their language, focus, approach, node management, scope of automation, and integration with CI/CD. Ansible is a versatile configuration management tool, while InSpec is a compliance testing tool.

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Advice on Ansible, InSpec

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	InSpec
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.	It is an open-source testing framework for infrastructure with a human- and machine-readable language for specifying compliance, security and policy requirements.
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.	-
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars 3.0K
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 683
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 336
Followers 15.6K	Followers 49
Votes 1.3K	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Backward compatibility 3 Bloated	No community feedback yet
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Linux Docker Windows

What are some alternatives to Ansible, InSpec?

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.

Robot Framework

It is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

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

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

Cucumber

Cucumber is a tool that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) - a software development process that aims to enhance software quality and reduce maintenance costs.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs InSpec: What are the differences?

Introduction

Language Ansible is written in Python, while InSpec is written in Ruby. This difference in programming languages can impact the ease of use and level of customization for users.
Configuration Management vs Compliance Testing One of the key differences between Ansible and InSpec is their primary focus. Ansible is mainly used as a configuration management tool, enabling administrators to define and manage the desired state of their infrastructure, while InSpec is primarily used for compliance testing, allowing users to assess whether their infrastructure meets certain security or regulatory standards.
Declarative vs Imperative Ansible follows a declarative approach, where users define the desired end state and the tool automatically handles the implementation. In contrast, InSpec follows an imperative approach, where users need to explicitly define each step in the testing process. This difference in approach can impact the learning curve and the complexity of writing automation scripts.
Agentless vs Agent-based Another significant difference between Ansible and InSpec is their approach to managing nodes. Ansible is an agentless tool, meaning it doesn't require any software to be installed on managed nodes. On the other hand, InSpec relies on agents that need to be installed and configured on each managed node. This can influence the ease of setup and the level of control over the managed nodes.
Scope of Automation Ansible is a versatile tool that can be used for a wide range of automation tasks, including configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. In contrast, InSpec is primarily focused on compliance testing and reporting, with a narrower scope of automation.
Integration with CI/CD Ansible is often integrated into the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment) pipeline, facilitating the automation of infrastructure provisioning and configuration. InSpec, on the other hand, is commonly used for security and compliance testing within the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring the infrastructure meets the required standards.

Ansible vs InSpec

Overview