Ansible vs Nuclide: 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; Nuclide: An open IDE for web and native mobile development, built on top of Atom (by Facebook). A unified developer experience for web and mobile development, built as a suite of packages on top of Atom to provide hackability and the support of an active community.
Ansible and Nuclide are primarily classified as "Server Configuration and Automation" and "Integrated Development Environment" tools respectively.
Some of the features offered by Ansible are:
- 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.
On the other hand, Nuclide provides the following key features:
- Remote development. At Facebook, our web and back-end engineers work on remote development servers in our data centers. Nuclide provides a pair of packages that allow connections over SSH to a lightweight node daemon on the server, making possible remote file editing and syntax/type validation. Of course, this also works for VMs, enabling local development on HHVM, for example.
- Hack language support. The Hack codebase is one of the largest at Facebook. First-class Hack support — including syntax highlighting, type-checking, autocomplete, and click-to-symbol features — has been an important requirement on Nuclide from the start. We're also excited that the growing Hack community outside the company will be able to enjoy dedicated IDE support.
- Flow support. For both local and remote JavaScript development, Flow has brought type integrity and the ability to quickly refactor our React components and apps. As it does for Hack, Nuclide supports Flow-specific decorations and editor features in @flow-annotated files.
"Agentless" is the primary reason why developers consider Ansible over the competitors, whereas "Remote development with SSH" was stated as the key factor in picking Nuclide.
Ansible and Nuclide are both open source tools. Ansible with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Nuclide with 7.99K GitHub stars and 745 GitHub forks.
DigitalOcean, 9GAG, and Rainist are some of the popular companies that use Ansible, whereas Nuclide is used by Facebook, Instagram, and Movielala. Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 961 company stacks & 589 developers stacks; compared to Nuclide, which is listed in 8 company stacks and 5 developer stacks.
