Ansible vs Traefik

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.6K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Traefik

Stacks967

Followers1.2K

Votes93

Ansible vs Traefik: 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 Traefik? Load Balancer for Microservices. Træfɪk is a modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer made to deploy microservices with ease. It supports several backends (Docker, Swarm, Mesos/Marathon, Kubernetes, Consul, Etcd, Zookeeper, BoltDB, Rest API, file...) to manage its configuration automatically and dynamically.

Ansible belongs to "Server Configuration and Automation" category of the tech stack, while Traefik can be primarily classified under "Load Balancer / Reverse Proxy".

"Agentless" is the primary reason why developers consider Ansible over the competitors, whereas "Kubernetes integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Traefik.

Ansible and Traefik are both open source tools. Ansible with 38.2K GitHub stars and 16K forks on GitHub appears to be more popular than Traefik with 23.2K GitHub stars and 2.4K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Ansible has a broader approval, being mentioned in 960 company stacks & 587 developers stacks; compared to Traefik, which is listed in 46 company stacks and 19 developer stacks.

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Advice on Ansible, Traefik

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	Traefik
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.	A modern HTTP reverse proxy and load balancer that makes deploying microservices easy. Traefik integrates with your existing infrastructure components and configures itself automatically and dynamically.
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.	Continuously updates its configuration (No restarts!); Supports multiple load balancing algorithms; Provides HTTPS to your microservices by leveraging Let's Encrypt (wildcard certificates support); Circuit breakers, retry; High Availability with cluster mode; See the magic through its clean web UI; Websocket, HTTP/2, GRPC ready; Provides metrics; Keeps access logs; Fast; Exposes a Rest API
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.6K	Stacks 967
Followers 15.6K	Followers 1.2K
Votes 1.3K	Votes 93
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 Doesn't Run on Windows 3 Backward compatibility	Pros 20 Kubernetes integration 18 Watch service discovery updates 14 Letsencrypt support 13 Swarm integration 12 Several backends Cons 7 Not very performant (fast) 7 Complicated setup
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Marathon InfluxDB Kubernetes Docker gRPC Let's Encrypt Google Kubernetes Engine Consul StatsD Docker Swarm

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Traefik?

HAProxy

HAProxy (High Availability Proxy) is a free, very fast and reliable solution offering high availability, load balancing, and proxying for TCP and HTTP-based applications.

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.

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.

Fabric

Fabric is a Python (2.5-2.7) library and command-line tool for streamlining the use of SSH for application deployment or systems administration tasks. It provides a basic suite of operations for executing local or remote shell commands (normally or via sudo) and uploading/downloading files, as well as auxiliary functionality such as prompting the running user for input, or aborting execution.

AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)

With Elastic Load Balancing, you can add and remove EC2 instances as your needs change without disrupting the overall flow of information. If one EC2 instance fails, Elastic Load Balancing automatically reroutes the traffic to the remaining running EC2 instances. If the failed EC2 instance is restored, Elastic Load Balancing restores the traffic to that instance. Elastic Load Balancing offers clients a single point of contact, and it can also serve as the first line of defense against attacks on your network. You can offload the work of encryption and decryption to Elastic Load Balancing, so your servers can focus on their main task.

AWS OpsWorks

Start from templates for common technologies like Ruby, Node.JS, PHP, and Java, or build your own using Chef recipes to install software packages and perform any task that you can script. AWS OpsWorks can scale your application using automatic load-based or time-based scaling and maintain the health of your application by detecting failed instances and replacing them. You have full control of deployments and automation of each component

Fly

Deploy apps through our global load balancer with minimal shenanigans. All Fly-enabled applications get free SSL certificates, accept traffic through our global network of datacenters, and encrypt all traffic from visitors through to application servers.

Related Comparisons

"Agentless" is the primary reason why developers consider Ansible over the competitors, whereas "Kubernetes integration" was stated as the key factor in picking Traefik.

Ansible vs Traefik