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Ansible vs Puppeteer: What are the differences?
What is 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.
What is Puppeteer? Headless Chrome Node API. Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome.
Ansible belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Puppeteer can be primarily classified under "Headless Browsers".
Ansible and Puppeteer are both open source tools. Puppeteer with 51.2K GitHub stars and 4.72K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Ansible with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K GitHub forks.
DigitalOcean, 9GAG, and Rainist are some of the popular companies that use Ansible, whereas Puppeteer is used by Huddle, Better, and Orangesys Inc.. Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 961 company stacks & 589 developers stacks; compared to Puppeteer, which is listed in 25 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.
I am using Node 12 for server scripting and have a function to generate PDF and send it to a browser. Currently, we are using PhantomJS to generate a PDF. Some web post shows that we can achieve PDF generation using Puppeteer. I was a bit confused. Should we move to puppeteerJS? Which one is better with NodeJS for generating PDF?

You better go with puppeteer. It is basically chrome automation tool, written in nodejs. So what you get is PDF, generated by chrome itself. I guess there is hardly better PDF generation tool for the web. Phantomjs is already more or less outdated as technology. It uses some old webkit port that's quite behind in terms of standards and features. It can be replaced with puppeteer for every single task.

I suggest puppeteer to go for. It is simple and easy to set up. Only limitaiton is it can be used only for chrome browser and currently they are looking into expanding into FF. The next thing is Playwright which is just a scale up of Puppeteer. It supports cross browsers.
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
- Agentless282
- Great configuration208
- Simple197
- Powerful175
- Easy to learn153
- Flexible67
- Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done54
- Makes sense34
- Super efficient and flexible30
- Powerful27
- Dynamic Inventory11
- Backed by Red Hat9
- Works with AWS7
- Cloud Oriented6
- Easy to maintain6
- Because SSH4
- Multi language4
- Easy4
- Simple4
- Procedural or declarative, or both4
- Simple and powerful4
- Consistency3
- Vagrant provisioner3
- Debugging is simple2
- Fast as hell2
- Well-documented2
- Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera2
- Masterless2
- Manage any OS1
- Certified Content1
- Work on windows, but difficult to manage1
Pros of Puppeteer
- Very well documented10
- Scriptable web browser10
- Promise based6
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Cons of Ansible
- Dangerous8
- Hard to install5
- Doesn't Run on Windows3
- Bloated3
- Backward compatibility3
- No immutable infrastructure2
Cons of Puppeteer
- Chrome only10