Ansible vs Marathon

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Marathon

Stacks84

Followers91

Votes5

Ansible vs Marathon: What are the differences?

Introduction

In the realm of DevOps and automation, Ansible and Marathon are two prominent tools that facilitate the management of infrastructure and applications. However, their approaches, functionality, and focus areas differ in several key aspects.

Configuration Management vs. Orchestration: One of the primary distinctions between Ansible and Marathon is their core functions. Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on defining and maintaining the desired state of systems. On the other hand, Marathon is an orchestration framework that specializes in managing and scaling containerized applications and microservices.
Agentless vs. Agent-Based: Another significant difference between Ansible and Marathon lies in their architecture. Ansible operates in an agentless fashion, where it connects to remote systems using SSH or other transports, without requiring any agent installation on the target host. In contrast, Marathon relies on agents (like Mesos agents) for managing tasks and applications across a cluster of machines.
Procedural vs. Declarative: When it comes to defining configurations and tasks, Ansible follows a procedural approach where users specify the steps to be executed in a particular order. In contrast, Marathon favors a declarative approach, where users describe the desired end state of the system, and the framework handles the necessary actions to achieve that state automatically.
Single Node vs. Cluster Management: Ansible is typically used for managing configurations and tasks on individual servers or a small group of machines, making it well-suited for tasks like system provisioning and application deployment. Meanwhile, Marathon is designed for cluster management, enabling users to deploy and scale containerized applications across a distributed environment more efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: In terms of community and ecosystem, Ansible boasts a larger and more diverse user base due to its broad range of use cases beyond container orchestration. This extensive community support translates to a wealth of resources, modules, and integrations that can aid users in implementing automation solutions. While Marathon has a focused user base within the container orchestration domain, it benefits from close integration with Mesos and other related technologies.
Complexity and Learning Curve: Finally, the learning curve and complexity of Ansible and Marathon can differ based on the user's background and requirements. Ansible's straightforward syntax and ease of use make it a preferred choice for beginners and IT professionals looking to automate tasks quickly. In contrast, Marathon's more specialized focus on container orchestration may require a deeper understanding of distributed systems, making it better suited for operations teams dealing with complex, large-scale environments.

In Summary, Ansible excels in configuration management and task automation, while Marathon shines in orchestrating containerized applications at scale with a declarative approach, offering users distinct advantages in different use cases within the DevOps landscape.

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Advice on Ansible, Marathon

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	Marathon
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.	Marathon is an Apache Mesos framework for container orchestration. Marathon provides a REST API for starting, stopping, and scaling applications. Marathon is written in Scala and can run in highly-available mode by running multiple copies. The state of running tasks gets stored in the Mesos state abstraction.
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 -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 84
Followers 15.6K	Followers 91
Votes 1.3K	Votes 5
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 1 High Availability 1 Load Balancing 1 Service Discovery 1 Health Checks 1 Powerful UI
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Mesosphere Apache Mesos Docker

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Marathon?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Rancher

Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

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.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

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.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Marathon: What are the differences?

Introduction

Configuration Management vs. Orchestration: One of the primary distinctions between Ansible and Marathon is their core functions. Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on defining and maintaining the desired state of systems. On the other hand, Marathon is an orchestration framework that specializes in managing and scaling containerized applications and microservices.
Agentless vs. Agent-Based: Another significant difference between Ansible and Marathon lies in their architecture. Ansible operates in an agentless fashion, where it connects to remote systems using SSH or other transports, without requiring any agent installation on the target host. In contrast, Marathon relies on agents (like Mesos agents) for managing tasks and applications across a cluster of machines.
Procedural vs. Declarative: When it comes to defining configurations and tasks, Ansible follows a procedural approach where users specify the steps to be executed in a particular order. In contrast, Marathon favors a declarative approach, where users describe the desired end state of the system, and the framework handles the necessary actions to achieve that state automatically.
Single Node vs. Cluster Management: Ansible is typically used for managing configurations and tasks on individual servers or a small group of machines, making it well-suited for tasks like system provisioning and application deployment. Meanwhile, Marathon is designed for cluster management, enabling users to deploy and scale containerized applications across a distributed environment more efficiently.
Community and Ecosystem: In terms of community and ecosystem, Ansible boasts a larger and more diverse user base due to its broad range of use cases beyond container orchestration. This extensive community support translates to a wealth of resources, modules, and integrations that can aid users in implementing automation solutions. While Marathon has a focused user base within the container orchestration domain, it benefits from close integration with Mesos and other related technologies.
Complexity and Learning Curve: Finally, the learning curve and complexity of Ansible and Marathon can differ based on the user's background and requirements. Ansible's straightforward syntax and ease of use make it a preferred choice for beginners and IT professionals looking to automate tasks quickly. In contrast, Marathon's more specialized focus on container orchestration may require a deeper understanding of distributed systems, making it better suited for operations teams dealing with complex, large-scale environments.

Ansible vs Marathon

Overview

Ansible vs Marathon: What are the differences?

Introduction

Share your Stack

Advice on Ansible, Marathon

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Marathon?

Kubernetes

Rancher

Docker Compose

Chef

Terraform

Docker Swarm

Tutum

Capistrano

Puppet Labs

Salt

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Ansible vs Marathon

Overview

Ansible vs Marathon: What are the differences?

Introduction

Share your Stack

Advice on Ansible, Marathon

Detailed Comparison

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Marathon?

Kubernetes

Rancher

Docker Compose

Chef

Terraform

Docker Swarm

Tutum

Capistrano

Puppet Labs

Salt

Related Comparisons

Bitbucket vs GitHub vs GitLab

AWS CodeCommit vs Bitbucket vs GitHub

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes vs Rancher

Grunt vs Webpack vs gulp

Grafana vs Graphite vs Kibana