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Ansible vs StackStorm: What are the differences?

Introduction:

In the world of automation, Ansible and StackStorm are two popular tools used to streamline and simplify IT operations. While both tools aim to achieve similar goals, there are key differences that set them apart.

  1. Architecture and Extensibility: Ansible follows a client-server architecture, where the main control node communicates with managed nodes over SSH or APIs. It uses a push model, where changes are pushed to the systems. On the other hand, StackStorm is based on an event-driven architecture. It listens for events and triggers actions based on them, making it highly extensible and suitable for event-driven environments.

  2. Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a massive community and a rich ecosystem of playbooks, modules, and roles available for various tasks. This makes it easier for users to reuse existing code and share best practices. StackStorm, although relatively newer, also has an active community and growing ecosystem, but it may have a narrower range of available integrations compared to Ansible.

  3. Workflow Automation vs Configuration Management: Ansible is primarily focused on configuration management and orchestration. It excels in managing and ensuring consistency across infrastructure and application configurations. StackStorm, on the other hand, is more focused on workflow automation and event-driven actions. It can integrate with various tools and systems to automate complex workflows.

  4. Language and Learning Curve: Ansible uses a declarative language called YAML for defining playbooks, making it relatively easy to understand and write. The learning curve for Ansible is usually considered smoother for beginners. StackStorm, on the other hand, uses a combination of YAML and Python. While this allows for greater flexibility and complexity, it may require users to have a stronger understanding of Python and scripting.

  5. Approach to Idempotency: In Ansible, idempotency is a core principle. It ensures that a particular state or configuration is maintained consistently across multiple runs, reducing the risk of unintended changes. StackStorm, being event-driven, may not inherently enforce idempotency. Actions triggered by events need to be carefully designed to achieve the desired idempotent behavior.

  6. Integration with Configuration Management Tools: Ansible seamlessly integrates with various configuration management tools, such as Puppet, Chef, and SaltStack. It can leverage their capabilities for specific tasks. StackStorm, while it may complement configuration management tools, is not specifically built for direct integration with them. It focuses more on workflow automation and event-driven actions rather than managing configuration details directly.

In summary, Ansible is a powerful configuration management and orchestration tool with a large community and extensive ecosystem, focusing on managing infrastructure and application configurations, while StackStorm is an event-driven workflow automation tool, offering greater extensibility and flexibility but with a steeper learning curve, narrower integration options, and a different approach to idempotency.

Advice on Ansible and StackStorm
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

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.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

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.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

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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Pros of Ansible
Pros of StackStorm
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
  • 69
    Flexible
  • 55
    Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
  • 35
    Makes sense
  • 30
    Super efficient and flexible
  • 27
    Powerful
  • 11
    Dynamic Inventory
  • 9
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 6
    Cloud Oriented
  • 6
    Easy to maintain
  • 4
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 4
    Simple and powerful
  • 4
    Multi language
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Because SSH
  • 4
    Procedural or declarative, or both
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Consistency
  • 2
    Well-documented
  • 2
    Masterless
  • 2
    Debugging is simple
  • 2
    Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
  • 2
    Fast as hell
  • 1
    Manage any OS
  • 1
    Work on windows, but difficult to manage
  • 1
    Certified Content
  • 7
    Auto-remediation
  • 5
    Integrations
  • 4
    Automation
  • 4
    Complex workflows
  • 3
    Open source
  • 2
    Beautiful UI
  • 2
    ChatOps
  • 2
    Python
  • 1
    Extensibility
  • 1
    Slack

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Cons of Ansible
Cons of StackStorm
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 2
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 3
    Complexity
  • 1
    There are not enough sources of information

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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 StackStorm?

StackStorm is a platform for integration and automation across services and tools. It ties together your existing infrastructure and application environment so you can more easily automate that environment -- with a particular focus on taking actions in response to events.

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What companies use Ansible?
What companies use StackStorm?
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What are some alternatives to Ansible and StackStorm?
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.
See all alternatives