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Ansible vs Pulumi: What are the differences?
Introduction
Ansible and Pulumi are both automation tools used in software development and infrastructure management. However, they have key differences that set them apart from each other.
Execution Model: Ansible operates on a push-based execution model, where the control machine pushes the configurations and instructions to target machines. On the other hand, Pulumi uses a pull-based execution model, where the infrastructure resources are continuously monitored for changes and updates are automatically applied to ensure the desired state.
Language Support: Ansible is primarily based on YAML, which provides a simple and human-readable syntax for defining tasks and configurations. In contrast, Pulumi supports multiple programming languages such as Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, and Go, allowing developers to express infrastructure as code using their preferred language.
Cloud Provider Integration: Ansible has support for a wide range of cloud providers, enabling developers to manage and provision resources across different cloud environments. Whereas Pulumi takes a multi-cloud approach and allows developers to define infrastructure resources using a unified API that transparently supports multiple cloud providers, making it easier to deploy and manage applications across diverse cloud environments.
Resource Lifecycle Management: Ansible utilizes idempotent tasks to ensure that the desired state is achieved on target machines. It focuses on executing tasks only when required and performs automatic cleanup of any unwanted changes. Pulumi, on the other hand, provides a declarative approach to resource lifecycle management, where developers define desired resources and dependencies, and Pulumi automatically manages the creation, updating, and deletion of those resources.
Workflow and Versioning: Ansible employs playbooks to define and orchestrate complex deployment workflows. Playbooks can be versioned using source control tools like Git, allowing developers to track changes and roll back if necessary. Pulumi leverages modern development workflows through standard development tools like IDEs, Git, and CI/CD systems. By treating infrastructure as code, developers can leverage software development best practices, including testing frameworks, code reviews, and continuous integration.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community with a vast collection of pre-built Ansible roles and modules available for various use cases and integrations with other tools. Pulumi, being a newer entrant, is rapidly growing its community and ecosystem, with a focus on collaborating with existing tools and frameworks to provide seamless integration and support.
In Summary, Ansible and Pulumi differ in their execution models, language support, cloud provider integration, resource lifecycle management, workflow and versioning capabilities, and community and ecosystem size.
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
Because Pulumi uses real programming languages, you can actually write abstractions for your infrastructure code, which is incredibly empowering. You still 'describe' your desired state, but by having a programming language at your fingers, you can factor out patterns, and package it up for easier consumption.
We use Terraform to manage AWS cloud environment for the project. It is pretty complex, largely static, security-focused, and constantly evolving.
Terraform provides descriptive (declarative) way of defining the target configuration, where it can work out the dependencies between configuration elements and apply differences without re-provisioning the entire cloud stack.
AdvantagesTerraform is vendor-neutral in a way that it is using a common configuration language (HCL) with plugins (providers) for multiple cloud and service providers.
Terraform keeps track of the previous state of the deployment and applies incremental changes, resulting in faster deployment times.
Terraform allows us to share reusable modules between projects. We have built an impressive library of modules internally, which makes it very easy to assemble a new project from pre-fabricated building blocks.
DisadvantagesSoftware is imperfect, and Terraform is no exception. Occasionally we hit annoying bugs that we have to work around. The interaction with any underlying APIs is encapsulated inside 3rd party Terraform providers, and any bug fixes or new features require a provider release. Some providers have very poor coverage of the underlying APIs.
Terraform is not great for managing highly dynamic parts of cloud environments. That part is better delegated to other tools or scripts.
Terraform state may go out of sync with the target environment or with the source configuration, which often results in painful reconciliation.
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 Pulumi
- Infrastructure as code with less pain8
- Best-in-class kubernetes support4
- Simple3
- Can use many languages3
- Great CLI2
- Can be self-hosted2
- Multi-cloud2
- Built-in secret management1
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Pulumi
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What is Ansible?
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