Ansible vs Rancher

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Rancher

Stacks952

Followers1.5K

Votes644

Ansible vs Rancher: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and Rancher are prominent tools in the world of DevOps orchestration and management. While both tools serve similar purposes, they have key differences that set them apart. In this article, we will explore the main differences between Ansible and Rancher.

Scalability: Ansible is designed to be highly scalable, allowing users to manage a large number of nodes efficiently. It achieves this through its lightweight agentless architecture, where it communicates with remote nodes through SSH or PowerShell. On the other hand, Rancher is a container management platform that focuses on orchestrating and managing containerized applications. It provides a centralized control plane and utilizes Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine, making it suitable for managing and scaling containerized workloads.
Infrastructure Provisioning: Ansible is a versatile automation tool that can handle various automation tasks, including infrastructure provisioning. It allows users to define infrastructure as code using its declarative language, YAML. Ansible can provision and configure servers, networks, and other infrastructure components, thereby enabling the automation of the entire deployment process. Conversely, Rancher is primarily focused on container orchestration and management. While it can provision cloud infrastructure resources through cloud providers' APIs, its primary purpose is to manage containers rather than tackle broader infrastructure provisioning tasks.
Configuration Management: Ansible takes a declarative approach to configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of their systems, and Ansible will ensure the systems reach that state. It achieves this by leveraging simple YAML-based playbooks. Rancher, however, focuses more on container orchestration and workload management rather than configuration management. It provides features to manage container configurations, such as secrets, environment variables, and volume mounts, but it does not offer the extensive configuration management capabilities that Ansible does.
Ease of Use: Ansible emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, making it accessible to users with different levels of expertise. Its human-readable YAML syntax and agentless architecture contribute to its user-friendly nature. Rancher, on the other hand, is a more specialized tool targeted specifically at container orchestration and workload management. While it provides a user-friendly web-based interface, it requires familiarity with containerization concepts and Kubernetes to effectively utilize its full potential.
Extensibility: Ansible offers a wide range of modules that allow users to interact with various systems and services, making it highly extensible. Users can also create their own custom modules tailored to their specific needs. Rancher, being built on top of Kubernetes, can leverage the extensive Kubernetes ecosystem and its wide range of extensions and plugins to enhance its functionality and support various workload requirements.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community, providing ample resources, documentation, and support. It has been in the market for a longer time, which has contributed to its well-established ecosystem of integrations and plugins. Rancher, although growing rapidly, has a more focused community due to its specialized nature. However, being based on Kubernetes, it can tap into the vast Kubernetes community and benefit from its contributions.

In summary, Ansible is a versatile automation tool suitable for infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, and more. Rancher, on the other hand, is a specialized container management platform built on top of Kubernetes, focusing on container orchestration and workload management.

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Advice on Ansible, Rancher

Anonymous

Sep 17, 2019

Needs advice

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.

329k views329k

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	Rancher
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.	Rancher is an open source container management platform that includes full distributions of Kubernetes, Apache Mesos and Docker Swarm, and makes it simple to operate container clusters on any cloud or infrastructure platform.
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.	Manage Hosts, Deploy Containers, Monitor Resources;User Management & Collaboration;Native Docker APIs & Tools;Monitoring and Logging;Connect Containers, Manage Disks, Deploy Load Balancers;Docker App Catalog; Included Kubernetes Distribution;Included Docker Swarm Distribution; Included Mesos Distribution;Infrastructure Management
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 952
Followers 15.6K	Followers 1.5K
Votes 1.3K	Votes 644
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Bloated 3 Backward compatibility 3 Doesn't Run on Windows	Pros 103 Easy to use 79 Open source and totally free 63 Multi-host docker-compose support 58 Simple 58 Load balancing and health check included Cons 10 Hosting Rancher can be complicated
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Jenkins Datadog Google Compute Engine Docker Compose Amazon EC2 DigitalOcean GitHub Docker Kubernetes Drone.io

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Rancher?

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

Docker Compose

With Compose, you define a multi-container application in a single file, then spin your application up in a single command which does everything that needs to be done to get it running.

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.

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.

Docker Swarm

Swarm serves the standard Docker API, so any tool which already communicates with a Docker daemon can use Swarm to transparently scale to multiple hosts: Dokku, Compose, Krane, Deis, DockerUI, Shipyard, Drone, Jenkins... and, of course, the Docker client itself.

Tutum

Tutum lets developers easily manage and run lightweight, portable, self-sufficient containers from any application. AWS-like control, Heroku-like ease. The same container that a developer builds and tests on a laptop can run at scale in Tutum.

Capistrano

Capistrano is a remote server automation tool. It supports the scripting and execution of arbitrary tasks, and includes a set of sane-default deployment workflows.

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.

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.

Portainer

It is a universal container management tool. It works with Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm and Azure ACI. It allows you to manage containers without needing to know platform-specific code.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Rancher: What are the differences?

Introduction

Scalability: Ansible is designed to be highly scalable, allowing users to manage a large number of nodes efficiently. It achieves this through its lightweight agentless architecture, where it communicates with remote nodes through SSH or PowerShell. On the other hand, Rancher is a container management platform that focuses on orchestrating and managing containerized applications. It provides a centralized control plane and utilizes Kubernetes as its underlying orchestration engine, making it suitable for managing and scaling containerized workloads.
Infrastructure Provisioning: Ansible is a versatile automation tool that can handle various automation tasks, including infrastructure provisioning. It allows users to define infrastructure as code using its declarative language, YAML. Ansible can provision and configure servers, networks, and other infrastructure components, thereby enabling the automation of the entire deployment process. Conversely, Rancher is primarily focused on container orchestration and management. While it can provision cloud infrastructure resources through cloud providers' APIs, its primary purpose is to manage containers rather than tackle broader infrastructure provisioning tasks.
Configuration Management: Ansible takes a declarative approach to configuration management, allowing users to define the desired state of their systems, and Ansible will ensure the systems reach that state. It achieves this by leveraging simple YAML-based playbooks. Rancher, however, focuses more on container orchestration and workload management rather than configuration management. It provides features to manage container configurations, such as secrets, environment variables, and volume mounts, but it does not offer the extensive configuration management capabilities that Ansible does.
Ease of Use: Ansible emphasizes simplicity and ease of use, making it accessible to users with different levels of expertise. Its human-readable YAML syntax and agentless architecture contribute to its user-friendly nature. Rancher, on the other hand, is a more specialized tool targeted specifically at container orchestration and workload management. While it provides a user-friendly web-based interface, it requires familiarity with containerization concepts and Kubernetes to effectively utilize its full potential.
Extensibility: Ansible offers a wide range of modules that allow users to interact with various systems and services, making it highly extensible. Users can also create their own custom modules tailored to their specific needs. Rancher, being built on top of Kubernetes, can leverage the extensive Kubernetes ecosystem and its wide range of extensions and plugins to enhance its functionality and support various workload requirements.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a large and active community, providing ample resources, documentation, and support. It has been in the market for a longer time, which has contributed to its well-established ecosystem of integrations and plugins. Rancher, although growing rapidly, has a more focused community due to its specialized nature. However, being based on Kubernetes, it can tap into the vast Kubernetes community and benefit from its contributions.

Ansible vs Rancher

Overview

Ansible vs Rancher: What are the differences?