Ansible vs Nomad

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Nomad

Stacks256

Followers344

Votes32

GitHub Stars15.9K

Forks2.0K

Ansible vs Nomad: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and Nomad are both popular tools used for automation and orchestration in a cloud or data center environment. While they share some similarities, there are key differences between the two that set them apart.

Architecture: One significant difference between Ansible and Nomad lies in their architecture. Ansible is agentless, meaning it does not require any software to be installed on the target machines. It achieves this by using SSH or PowerShell to connect to remote machines and execute tasks. On the other hand, Nomad follows a client-server architecture, where a Nomad agent needs to be installed and running on the target machines to execute jobs and manage resources.
Language: Ansible uses a declarative language called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) to define its playbooks. This allows users to specify the desired state of a system rather than writing step-by-step instructions. In contrast, Nomad uses a configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). HCL is more flexible and allows users to define complex resource configurations and dependencies.
Target Usage: Ansible is primarily focused on configuration management, which involves provisioning and configuring software on servers. It excels at tasks such as package installation, file management, and service management. On the other hand, Nomad is designed for job orchestration and scheduling. It is commonly used to manage and allocate resources for running containerized applications or batch workloads across a dynamic infrastructure.
Scalability: When it comes to scalability, Nomad offers more advanced features. It can distribute jobs and tasks across thousands of machines in a cluster, providing high availability and fault tolerance. Ansible, while capable of managing large infrastructures, may face performance issues when dealing with a large number of target machines, as it relies on SSH connections for remote execution.
Integration with other tools: Ansible has a strong focus on integration and interoperability. It provides a rich set of modules that can interact with various APIs, services, and systems, making it highly extensible. Nomad also supports integrations, but its ecosystem is more focused on working seamlessly with other HashiCorp products, such as Consul for service discovery and Vault for secrets management.
Learning Curve: Ansible has a relatively low learning curve, especially for users familiar with YAML and Python. Its simple syntax and extensive documentation make it accessible for both beginners and experienced sysadmins. Nomad, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve due to its specific language and concepts. Understanding how to write HCL configurations and work with the Nomad ecosystem may require more time and effort.

In Summary, Ansible and Nomad differ in terms of architecture, language, target usage, scalability, integration capabilities, and the learning curve they present to users.

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Advice on Ansible, Nomad

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	Nomad
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 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'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.	Handles the scheduling and upgrading of the applications over time; With built-in dry-run execution, Nomad shows what scheduling decisions it will take before it takes them. Operators can approve or deny these changes to create a safe and reproducible workflow; Nomad runs applications and ensures they keep running in failure scenarios. In addition to long-running services, Nomad can schedule batch jobs, distributed cron jobs, and parameterized jobs; Stream logs, send signals, and interact with the file system of scheduled applications. These operator-friendly commands bring the familiar debugging tools to a scheduled world
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars 15.9K
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks 2.0K
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 256
Followers 15.6K	Followers 344
Votes 1.3K	Votes 32
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 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility	Pros 7 Built in Consul integration 6 Easy setup 4 Bult-in Vault integration 3 Built-in federation support 2 Autoscaling support Cons 3 Easy to start with 1 HCL language for configuration, an unpopular DSL 1 Small comunity
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Consul Docker Vault

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Nomad?

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.

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

Apache Mesos

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

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

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Nomad: What are the differences?

Introduction

Architecture: One significant difference between Ansible and Nomad lies in their architecture. Ansible is agentless, meaning it does not require any software to be installed on the target machines. It achieves this by using SSH or PowerShell to connect to remote machines and execute tasks. On the other hand, Nomad follows a client-server architecture, where a Nomad agent needs to be installed and running on the target machines to execute jobs and manage resources.
Language: Ansible uses a declarative language called YAML (Yet Another Markup Language) to define its playbooks. This allows users to specify the desired state of a system rather than writing step-by-step instructions. In contrast, Nomad uses a configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). HCL is more flexible and allows users to define complex resource configurations and dependencies.
Target Usage: Ansible is primarily focused on configuration management, which involves provisioning and configuring software on servers. It excels at tasks such as package installation, file management, and service management. On the other hand, Nomad is designed for job orchestration and scheduling. It is commonly used to manage and allocate resources for running containerized applications or batch workloads across a dynamic infrastructure.
Scalability: When it comes to scalability, Nomad offers more advanced features. It can distribute jobs and tasks across thousands of machines in a cluster, providing high availability and fault tolerance. Ansible, while capable of managing large infrastructures, may face performance issues when dealing with a large number of target machines, as it relies on SSH connections for remote execution.
Integration with other tools: Ansible has a strong focus on integration and interoperability. It provides a rich set of modules that can interact with various APIs, services, and systems, making it highly extensible. Nomad also supports integrations, but its ecosystem is more focused on working seamlessly with other HashiCorp products, such as Consul for service discovery and Vault for secrets management.
Learning Curve: Ansible has a relatively low learning curve, especially for users familiar with YAML and Python. Its simple syntax and extensive documentation make it accessible for both beginners and experienced sysadmins. Nomad, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve due to its specific language and concepts. Understanding how to write HCL configurations and work with the Nomad ecosystem may require more time and effort.

In Summary, Ansible and Nomad differ in terms of architecture, language, target usage, scalability, integration capabilities, and the learning curve they present to users.

Ansible vs Nomad

Overview

Ansible vs Nomad: What are the differences?