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Ansible vs Packer: What are the differences?
Ansible and Packer are both widely used tools in the world of DevOps and infrastructure automation. Let's explore the key differences between them.
Provisioning vs Configuration Management: Packer is primarily used for creating machine images or artifacts, allowing users to quickly provision new instances with pre-configured software and settings. On the other hand, Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool, used to automate the setup and maintenance of software and systems on existing instances.
Image vs Agent-based: Packer creates self-contained machine images, which can be directly deployed onto cloud platforms or virtualization systems. These images contain the necessary software and configurations to run applications without the need for a separate agent. In contrast, Ansible is agentless and operates by executing tasks remotely on target systems using SSH or WinRM, making it more suitable for managing existing instances.
Language and Configuration: Packer uses a configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or JSON, allowing users to define the image creation process, including the base image, provisioners, and post-processing steps. On the other hand, Ansible uses a declarative language called YAML, which allows users to describe the desired state of systems and specify tasks to bring them into that state.
Domain-specific vs General Purpose: Packer is specifically designed for creating machine images and focuses on system-level tasks like installing software, configuring settings, and performing disk optimizations. In contrast, Ansible is a more general-purpose tool that can be used for a wide range of automation tasks, including system configuration, application deployment, and orchestration of multi-tier infrastructures.
Parallelism and Dependency Management: Packer builds images in parallel, exploiting the available resources to minimize the time required to create the images. It also supports dependency management by allowing builders to be defined in stages, ensuring that the necessary components are built in the correct order. Ansible, on the other hand, performs tasks sequentially by default, but can be configured to run tasks in parallel. It also supports dependency management through its modular structure, allowing tasks to be executed in a specific order.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Ansible and Packer have vibrant communities and extensive ecosystems. Ansible has a large collection of pre-built roles and modules maintained by the community, making it easier to automate common tasks. Packer, on the other hand, provides builders and provisioners for various cloud platforms and virtualization technologies, enabling users to quickly create images for different environments.
In summary, Ansible is a powerful configuration management tool that operates on existing instances using an agentless approach, while Packer is primarily used for creating self-contained machine images.
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
- Agentless284
- Great configuration210
- Simple199
- Powerful176
- Easy to learn155
- Flexible69
- 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
- Vagrant provisioner4
- Simple and powerful4
- Multi language4
- Simple4
- Because SSH4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Easy4
- Consistency3
- Well-documented2
- Masterless2
- Debugging is simple2
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Fast as hell2
- Manage any OS1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
- Certified Content1
Pros of Packer
- Cross platform builds27
- Vm creation automation9
- Bake in security4
- Good documentation1
- Easy to use1
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2