Ansible vs Vagrant

Overview

Ansible

Stacks19.5K

Followers15.6K

Votes1.3K

GitHub Stars66.9K

Forks24.1K

Vagrant

Stacks11.9K

Followers7.8K

Votes1.5K

Ansible vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

Introduction Ansible and Vagrant are both popular open-source tools used in the field of DevOps for automating and managing infrastructure. However, there are several key differences between the two.

Configuration Management vs. Virtualization: The primary difference between Ansible and Vagrant lies in their intended purposes. Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on enabling the automation of infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and deployment processes. On the other hand, Vagrant is primarily a virtualization tool that enables the creation and management of portable development environments using virtual machines or containers.
Agentless vs. Client-Server Architecture: Another significant difference between Ansible and Vagrant is their underlying architecture. Ansible follows an agentless approach, which means it does not require any agents to be installed on the target systems. It uses SSH for connecting to the remote machines and executes tasks directly over SSH connections. In contrast, Vagrant follows a client-server architecture, where the Vagrant client interacts with a remote Vagrant server that manages the virtual machines or containers.
Declarative vs. Imperative: Ansible operates based on a declarative approach, where the user defines the desired state of the infrastructure or configuration, and Ansible ensures that the current state matches the desired state. It achieves this by idempotent execution of tasks and applying changes only if necessary. On the other hand, Vagrant follows an imperative approach, where the user specifies the exact steps to be executed to provision and configure the virtual environment.
Platform and Environment Independence: Another difference lies in the platform and environment independence offered by Ansible and Vagrant. Ansible can be used to manage a wide range of operating systems, network devices, and cloud platforms, providing a high degree of flexibility and compatibility. Vagrant, on the other hand, is primarily focused on providing developers with a consistent and reproducible development environment, making it more targeted towards supporting specific virtualization or containerization platforms.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Ansible and Vagrant have active communities and a rich ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations. However, Ansible's community is larger, and it has a more extensive ecosystem with a wider range of pre-built modules, playbooks, and roles available for various use cases. Vagrant's community and ecosystem are more focused on the development environment space, providing a variety of base boxes and plugins specifically tailored for virtualization and containerization.
Learning Curve and Complexity: When it comes to the learning curve, Ansible is generally considered easier to learn and use compared to Vagrant. Ansible uses a simple and human-readable syntax (YAML) for defining tasks and plays, allowing users to quickly start automating their infrastructure. Vagrant, on the other hand, requires familiarity with virtualization technologies and may involve more complex configurations depending on the specific use case.

In summary, Ansible and Vagrant differ in their primary purposes, architecture, approach to automation, platform independence, community and ecosystem size, as well as the learning curve and complexity. Understanding these differences can help determine which tool is better suited for specific DevOps requirements.

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Advice on Ansible, Vagrant

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	Vagrant
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.	Vagrant provides the framework and configuration format to create and manage complete portable development environments. These development environments can live on your computer or in the cloud, and are portable between Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.
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.	Boxes;Up And SSH;Synced Folders;Provisioning;Networking;Share;Teardown;Rebuild;Providers
Statistics
GitHub Stars 66.9K	GitHub Stars -
GitHub Forks 24.1K	GitHub Forks -
Stacks 19.5K	Stacks 11.9K
Followers 15.6K	Followers 7.8K
Votes 1.3K	Votes 1.5K
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 352 Development environments 290 Simple bootstraping 237 Free 139 Boxes 130 Provisioning Cons 2 Multiple VMs quickly eat up disk space 2 Can become v complex w prod. provisioner (Salt, etc.) 1 Development environment that kills your battery
Integrations
Nexmo Stackdriver VMware vSphere Docker OpenStack Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Google Compute Engine New Relic PagerDuty	Amazon EC2 Microsoft Azure DigitalOcean HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud Rackspace Cloud Servers SoftLayer VirtualBox

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Vagrant?

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.

boot2docker

boot2docker is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Tiny Core Linux made specifically to run Docker containers. It runs completely from RAM, weighs ~27MB and boots in ~5s (YMMV).

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 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

Otto

Otto automatically builds development environments without any configuration; it can detect your project type and has built-in knowledge of industry-standard tools to setup a development environment that is ready to go. When you're ready to deploy, otto builds and manages an infrastructure, sets up servers, builds, and deploys the application.

libvirt

It is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies.

Related Comparisons

Ansible vs Vagrant: What are the differences?

Configuration Management vs. Virtualization: The primary difference between Ansible and Vagrant lies in their intended purposes. Ansible is primarily a configuration management tool that focuses on enabling the automation of infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and deployment processes. On the other hand, Vagrant is primarily a virtualization tool that enables the creation and management of portable development environments using virtual machines or containers.
Agentless vs. Client-Server Architecture: Another significant difference between Ansible and Vagrant is their underlying architecture. Ansible follows an agentless approach, which means it does not require any agents to be installed on the target systems. It uses SSH for connecting to the remote machines and executes tasks directly over SSH connections. In contrast, Vagrant follows a client-server architecture, where the Vagrant client interacts with a remote Vagrant server that manages the virtual machines or containers.
Declarative vs. Imperative: Ansible operates based on a declarative approach, where the user defines the desired state of the infrastructure or configuration, and Ansible ensures that the current state matches the desired state. It achieves this by idempotent execution of tasks and applying changes only if necessary. On the other hand, Vagrant follows an imperative approach, where the user specifies the exact steps to be executed to provision and configure the virtual environment.
Platform and Environment Independence: Another difference lies in the platform and environment independence offered by Ansible and Vagrant. Ansible can be used to manage a wide range of operating systems, network devices, and cloud platforms, providing a high degree of flexibility and compatibility. Vagrant, on the other hand, is primarily focused on providing developers with a consistent and reproducible development environment, making it more targeted towards supporting specific virtualization or containerization platforms.
Community and Ecosystem: Both Ansible and Vagrant have active communities and a rich ecosystem of plugins, extensions, and integrations. However, Ansible's community is larger, and it has a more extensive ecosystem with a wider range of pre-built modules, playbooks, and roles available for various use cases. Vagrant's community and ecosystem are more focused on the development environment space, providing a variety of base boxes and plugins specifically tailored for virtualization and containerization.
Learning Curve and Complexity: When it comes to the learning curve, Ansible is generally considered easier to learn and use compared to Vagrant. Ansible uses a simple and human-readable syntax (YAML) for defining tasks and plays, allowing users to quickly start automating their infrastructure. Vagrant, on the other hand, requires familiarity with virtualization technologies and may involve more complex configurations depending on the specific use case.

Ansible vs Vagrant

Overview