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Ansible vs Nomad: What are the differences?
Ansible: Radically simple configuration-management, application deployment, task-execution, and multi-node orchestration engine. 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; Nomad: A cluster manager and scheduler. 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.
Ansible belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Nomad can be primarily classified under "Cluster Management".
Ansible and Nomad are both open source tools. Ansible with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Nomad with 4.94K GitHub stars and 892 GitHub forks.
According to the StackShare community, Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 960 company stacks & 588 developers stacks; compared to Nomad, which is listed in 21 company stacks and 3 developer stacks.
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.
I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Pros of Ansible
- Agentless283
- Great configuration209
- Simple198
- Powerful176
- Easy to learn154
- Flexible68
- Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done55
- Makes sense35
- Super efficient and flexible30
- Powerful27
- Dynamic Inventory11
- Backed by Red Hat9
- Works with AWS7
- Cloud Oriented6
- Easy to maintain6
- Multi language4
- Because SSH4
- Vagrant provisioner4
- Easy4
- Simple4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Simple and powerful4
- Consistency3
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Debugging is simple2
- Fast as hell2
- Well-documented2
- Masterless2
- Manage any OS1
- Certified Content1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
Pros of Nomad
- Built in Consul integration7
- Easy setup6
- Bult-in Vault integration4
- Built-in federation support3
- Self-healing2
- Autoscaling support2
- Bult-in Vault inegration1
- Stable1
- Simple1
- Nice ACL1
- Managable by terraform1
- Open source1
- Multiple workload support1
- Flexible1
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Nomad
- Easy to start with3
- HCL language for configuration, an unpopular DSL1
- Small comunity1
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