Ansible vs NixOS

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

NixOS

Stacks114

Followers96

Votes12

Ansible vs NixOS: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Ansible and NixOS

Introduction

Ansible and NixOS are both powerful tools in the realm of configuration management and infrastructure automation. However, they have several key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore and outline these differences.

Architecture: Ansible is agentless and follows a client-server model where the control machine pushes configurations to the target hosts over SSH. On the other hand, NixOS is a declarative Linux distribution where the configuration is described in a single file and applied to the entire system.
Package Management: Ansible relies on existing package managers to install and manage software packages on the target hosts. It can interact with package managers like apt, yum, etc. NixOS, on the other hand, employs its own package manager called Nix, which allows for atomic upgrades and rollbacks and ensures that all dependencies are managed consistently.
Idempotency: Ansible primarily focuses on idempotency, which means that running the same configuration multiple times results in the same outcome without causing any undesired side effects. NixOS takes this even further by enforcing determinism, where its declarative nature ensures that the system state is always consistent and reproducible.
Configuration Language: Ansible uses YAML as its configuration language, which is known for its simplicity and human-readability. In contrast, NixOS leverages the Nix expression language, which is a functional language designed for configuration and package description, allowing for more advanced and expressive configurations.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a vast and thriving community with a wide range of community-developed roles and modules available for various tasks. This extensive ecosystem makes it easier to automate common infrastructure management tasks. NixOS, although gaining popularity, has a smaller community and a more focused ecosystem due to its relatively niche use case as a Linux distribution.
System Updates: Ansible provides facilities to perform rolling updates, where a subset of hosts can be updated while the rest of the infrastructure remains operational. NixOS, being a complete operating system, allows for atomic system upgrades where the entire system is updated as a whole, ensuring that the system remains consistent during the update process.

In Summary, Ansible and NixOS differ in their architecture, package management approach, focus on idempotency and determinism, choice of configuration language, community and ecosystem, and system update capabilities.

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Advice on Ansible, NixOS

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	NixOS
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 a Linux distribution with a unique approach to package and configuration management. Built on top of the Nix package manager, it is completely declarative, makes upgrading systems reliable, and has many other advantages.
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.	DevOps-friendly; atomic upgrades and rollbacks
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 114
Followers 15.6K	Followers 96
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 Backward compatibility 3 Bloated 3 Doesn't Run on Windows	Pros 3 Atomic upgrades 2 Reproducible environment 2 Multi-user package management 2 Declarative system configuration 2 Rollback for any changes
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Apache Tomcat PostgreSQL

What are some alternatives to Ansible, NixOS?

Ubuntu

Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning ‘humanity to others’. It also means ‘I am what I am because of who we all are’. The Ubuntu operating system brings the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers.

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.

Debian

Debian systems currently use the Linux kernel or the FreeBSD kernel. Linux is a piece of software started by Linus Torvalds and supported by thousands of programmers worldwide. FreeBSD is an operating system including a kernel and other software.

Arch Linux

A lightweight and flexible Linux distribution that tries to Keep It Simple.

Fedora

Fedora is a Linux-based operating system that provides users with access to the latest free and open source software, in a stable, secure and easy to manage form. Fedora is the largest of many free software creations of the Fedora Project. Because of its predominance, the word "Fedora" is often used interchangeably to mean both the Fedora Project and the Fedora operating system.

Linux Mint

The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs NixOS: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Ansible and NixOS

Introduction

Architecture: Ansible is agentless and follows a client-server model where the control machine pushes configurations to the target hosts over SSH. On the other hand, NixOS is a declarative Linux distribution where the configuration is described in a single file and applied to the entire system.
Package Management: Ansible relies on existing package managers to install and manage software packages on the target hosts. It can interact with package managers like apt, yum, etc. NixOS, on the other hand, employs its own package manager called Nix, which allows for atomic upgrades and rollbacks and ensures that all dependencies are managed consistently.
Idempotency: Ansible primarily focuses on idempotency, which means that running the same configuration multiple times results in the same outcome without causing any undesired side effects. NixOS takes this even further by enforcing determinism, where its declarative nature ensures that the system state is always consistent and reproducible.
Configuration Language: Ansible uses YAML as its configuration language, which is known for its simplicity and human-readability. In contrast, NixOS leverages the Nix expression language, which is a functional language designed for configuration and package description, allowing for more advanced and expressive configurations.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a vast and thriving community with a wide range of community-developed roles and modules available for various tasks. This extensive ecosystem makes it easier to automate common infrastructure management tasks. NixOS, although gaining popularity, has a smaller community and a more focused ecosystem due to its relatively niche use case as a Linux distribution.
System Updates: Ansible provides facilities to perform rolling updates, where a subset of hosts can be updated while the rest of the infrastructure remains operational. NixOS, being a complete operating system, allows for atomic system upgrades where the entire system is updated as a whole, ensuring that the system remains consistent during the update process.

In Summary, Ansible and NixOS differ in their architecture, package management approach, focus on idempotency and determinism, choice of configuration language, community and ecosystem, and system update capabilities.

Ansible vs NixOS

Overview

Ansible vs NixOS: What are the differences?

Key Differences between Ansible and NixOS

Introduction