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Ansible vs Puppet Bolt: What are the differences?
- Installation and Setup: The installation and setup process of Ansible involves a simple and straightforward configuration, as it is agentless and requires only SSH access to the target hosts. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt requires the installation of the Bolt tool on the control machine and the installation of Bolt agents on the target hosts. This adds an extra step and complexity to the setup process.
- Operating System Support: Ansible has a wider range of operating system support compared to Puppet Bolt. It can be used on various Linux distributions, Windows operating systems, macOS, and even network devices. On the other hand, Puppet Bolt has more limited support, primarily focusing on Linux and Windows.
- Resource Abstraction: Ansible uses modules to abstract the resources it manages, which allows it to work with a wide range of systems without requiring any specific knowledge of the individual system internals. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, relies on Puppet's Resource Abstraction Layer (RAL), which provides a unified interface for managing specific resources on different target platforms.
- Ease of Use: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use, with a minimal learning curve and its ability to use simple YAML files for defining automation tasks. Puppet Bolt, while also providing an easy-to-use interface, requires more knowledge of the underlying Puppet ecosystem and its specific language for defining tasks and plans.
- Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community with extensive documentation, a wide range of pre-built modules, and integrations with other tools and systems. Puppet Bolt, while steadily growing, has a smaller community and ecosystem in comparison, which may limit the availability of pre-built content and support.
- Control Plane Requirements: Ansible operates using a push-based model, where the control machine initiates the execution of tasks on the target hosts. Puppet Bolt, on the other hand, can operate using a push-based model like Ansible, but it also supports a more flexible agent-based model where the target hosts pull tasks from the control machine. This gives Puppet Bolt more flexibility when dealing with certain network constraints or when working in highly regulated environments.
In Summary, Ansible and Puppet Bolt differ in their installation and setup process, operating system support, resource abstraction, ease of use, community and ecosystem, as well as the control plane requirements.
Advice on Ansible and Puppet Bolt
moonlight16
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.
Replies (2)
Stefan Papp
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.
Gabriel Pa
CEO at NaoLogic Inc · | 2 upvotes · 315.4K views
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
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Learn MorePros of Ansible
Pros of Puppet Bolt
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 Puppet Bolt
- Simple3
- Easy to Install2
- Powerful2
- Agentless2
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Cons of Ansible
Cons of Puppet Bolt
Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Puppet Bolt
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What is Ansible?
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.
What is Puppet Bolt?
It is an open source orchestration tool that automates the manual work it takes to maintain your infrastructure. Use it to automate tasks that you perform on an as-needed basis or as part of a greater orchestration workflow.
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What are some alternatives to Ansible and Puppet Bolt?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.