Ansible vs TeamCity

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

TeamCity

Stacks1.2K

Followers1.1K

Votes316

Ansible vs TeamCity: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and TeamCity are both popular tools used in the field of DevOps, but they have significant differences in terms of their features and capabilities.

Installation and Configuration: When it comes to installation and configuration, Ansible is agentless and uses a push-based approach. It does not require any software or agents to be installed on the target systems. On the other hand, TeamCity requires a server to be installed, and agents need to be set up on the target systems to enable communication with the server.
Ease of Use: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use. It uses YAML-based configuration files, which are easy to read and write. Ansible playbooks provide a clear and concise way to define the desired state of systems. TeamCity, although powerful, can be more complex to configure and set up due to its extensive feature set and user interface.
Scope of Automation: Ansible is primarily focused on configuration management and automation. It excels in tasks like infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and orchestration. TeamCity, on the other hand, is specifically designed for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. It provides features like build management, test automation, and release management.
Scalability: Ansible is highly scalable and can handle a large number of target systems. It uses a parallel execution model to enforce configuration on multiple systems simultaneously. TeamCity, while scalable, is more suited for smaller to medium-sized projects. It can handle multiple build agents, but larger deployments might require additional configuration and resources.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a vibrant community and a vast ecosystem of roles and modules that can be easily leveraged for various automation tasks. The Ansible Galaxy repository contains a wide range of pre-built roles contributed by the community. TeamCity also has an active community, but its ecosystem is more centered around build configurations and plugins specifically tailored for CI/CD workflows.
System Requirements: Ansible has minimal system requirements as it only requires Python to be installed on the control machine. It can manage systems running various operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Unix-like systems. TeamCity, on the other hand, has specific system requirements that include Java and a supported database server. It needs to be installed on a dedicated server with adequate resources to handle the build and deployment workflows.

In Summary, Ansible and TeamCity differ in their installation and configuration approach, ease of use, scope of automation, scalability, community and ecosystem, and system requirements.

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Advice on Ansible, TeamCity

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.

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Detailed Comparison

Ansible	TeamCity
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.	TeamCity is a user-friendly continuous integration (CI) server for professional developers, build engineers, and DevOps. It is trivial to setup and absolutely free for small teams and open source projects.
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.	Automate code analyzing, compiling, and testing processes, with having instant feedback on build progress, problems, and test failures, all in a simple, intuitive web-interface; Simplified setup: create projects from just a VCS repository URL;Run multiple builds and tests under different configurations and platforms simultaneously; Make sure your team sustains an uninterrupted workflow with the help of Pretested commits and Personal builds; Have build history insight with customizable statistics on build duration, success rate, code quality, and custom metrics; Enable cost-effective on-demand build infrastructure scaling thanks to tight integration with Amazon EC2; Easily extend TeamCity functionality and add new integrations using Java API; Great visual project representation. Track any changes made by any user in the system, filter projects and choose style of visual change status representation;
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 1.2K
Followers 15.6K	Followers 1.1K
Votes 1.3K	Votes 316
Pros & Cons
Pros 284 Agentless 210 Great configuration 199 Simple 176 Powerful 155 Easy to learn Cons 8 Dangerous 5 Hard to install 3 Backward compatibility 3 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Bloated	Pros 61 Easy to configure 37 Reliable and high-quality 32 On premise 32 User friendly 32 Github integration Cons 3 High costs for more than three build agents 2 User-friendly 2 User friendly 2 Proprietary
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Slack

What are some alternatives to Ansible, TeamCity?

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.

Travis CI

Free for open source projects, our CI environment provides multiple runtimes (e.g. Node.js or PHP versions), data stores and so on. Because of this, hosting your project on travis-ci.com means you can effortlessly test your library or applications against multiple runtimes and data stores without even having all of them installed locally.

Codeship

Codeship runs your automated tests and configured deployment when you push to your repository. It takes care of managing and scaling the infrastructure so that you are able to test and release more frequently and get faster feedback for building the product your users need.

CircleCI

Continuous integration and delivery platform helps software teams rapidly release code with confidence by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Offers a modern software development platform that lets teams ramp.

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.

Drone.io

Drone is a hosted continuous integration service. It enables you to conveniently set up projects to automatically build, test, and deploy as you make changes to your code. Drone integrates seamlessly with Github, Bitbucket and Google Code as well as third party services such as Heroku, Dotcloud, Google AppEngine and more.

wercker

Wercker is a CI/CD developer automation platform designed for Microservices & Container Architecture.

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.

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Ansible vs TeamCity: What are the differences?

Introduction

Ansible and TeamCity are both popular tools used in the field of DevOps, but they have significant differences in terms of their features and capabilities.

Installation and Configuration: When it comes to installation and configuration, Ansible is agentless and uses a push-based approach. It does not require any software or agents to be installed on the target systems. On the other hand, TeamCity requires a server to be installed, and agents need to be set up on the target systems to enable communication with the server.
Ease of Use: Ansible is known for its simplicity and ease of use. It uses YAML-based configuration files, which are easy to read and write. Ansible playbooks provide a clear and concise way to define the desired state of systems. TeamCity, although powerful, can be more complex to configure and set up due to its extensive feature set and user interface.
Scope of Automation: Ansible is primarily focused on configuration management and automation. It excels in tasks like infrastructure provisioning, application deployment, and orchestration. TeamCity, on the other hand, is specifically designed for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows. It provides features like build management, test automation, and release management.
Scalability: Ansible is highly scalable and can handle a large number of target systems. It uses a parallel execution model to enforce configuration on multiple systems simultaneously. TeamCity, while scalable, is more suited for smaller to medium-sized projects. It can handle multiple build agents, but larger deployments might require additional configuration and resources.
Community and Ecosystem: Ansible has a vibrant community and a vast ecosystem of roles and modules that can be easily leveraged for various automation tasks. The Ansible Galaxy repository contains a wide range of pre-built roles contributed by the community. TeamCity also has an active community, but its ecosystem is more centered around build configurations and plugins specifically tailored for CI/CD workflows.
System Requirements: Ansible has minimal system requirements as it only requires Python to be installed on the control machine. It can manage systems running various operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Unix-like systems. TeamCity, on the other hand, has specific system requirements that include Java and a supported database server. It needs to be installed on a dedicated server with adequate resources to handle the build and deployment workflows.

In Summary, Ansible and TeamCity differ in their installation and configuration approach, ease of use, scope of automation, scalability, community and ecosystem, and system requirements.