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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. Ansible vs Visual Studio

Ansible vs Visual Studio

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Ansible
Ansible
Stacks19.5K
Followers15.6K
Votes1.3K
GitHub Stars66.9K
Forks24.1K
Visual Studio
Visual Studio
Stacks59.6K
Followers37.9K
Votes1.1K

Ansible vs Visual Studio: What are the differences?

## Introduction
In this Markdown code, we will compare the key differences between Ansible and Visual Studio.

1. **Management Approach**: Ansible is an open-source automation tool that uses a declarative language, making it easier for users to define what the end state should look like without specifying each step. On the other hand, Visual Studio is an integrated development environment (IDE) primarily used for writing, debugging, and building code.
   
2. **Target Audience**: Ansible is more suitable for system administrators and DevOps professionals who need to automate IT infrastructure tasks. In contrast, Visual Studio is designed for software developers who work on coding projects and need tools for version control, debugging, and collaboration.

3. **Configuration Complexity**: Ansible is known for its simplicity in configuration management tasks, allowing users to write playbooks in YAML format with minimal coding required. Visual Studio, on the other hand, offers a wide range of features for customizing the development environment, including support for various programming languages, extensions, and integrations.

4. **Supported Platforms**: Ansible supports a wide range of operating systems and cloud providers, making it versatile for managing diverse IT environments. Visual Studio, on the other hand, is more focused on providing a comprehensive development platform for Windows, MacOS, and Linux users.

5. **Collaboration Features**: Ansible provides built-in features for collaboration through roles and playbooks, allowing teams to work together on automation tasks efficiently. In contrast, Visual Studio offers features like version control with Git and integration with Azure DevOps for team collaboration on coding projects.

6. **Deployment Automation**: Ansible excels in automating deployment processes across different environments, making it ideal for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. Visual Studio also supports deployment automation through tools like Azure DevOps, but its primary focus is on the development lifecycle.

In Summary, the key distinctions between Ansible and Visual Studio lie in their management approach, target audience, configuration complexity, supported platforms, collaboration features, and deployment automation capabilities.

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Advice on Ansible, Visual Studio

Anonymous
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
Comments
William
William

Sep 10, 2019

Needs advice

The problem I have is whether to choose Android Studio or Visual Studio? I have to develop a simple app for a school project that can work on both iPhone and Android.

The most important factors for me are Android and iOS compatibility. Although note that i would like to become a Software Engineer when i finish my course. (I'd like to work for Apple, just saying!)

After that id like easy integration for Google Ads and such if i do develop another app that people actually use to support development. (I'd also like to stick with one easy programming language that's compatible with a wide variety of platforms since i'm a beginner and have only ever used Pascal)

565k views565k
Comments

Detailed Comparison

Ansible
Ansible
Visual Studio
Visual Studio

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.

Visual Studio is a suite of component-based software development tools and other technologies for building powerful, high-performance applications.

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.
-
Statistics
GitHub Stars
66.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
24.1K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
19.5K
Stacks
59.6K
Followers
15.6K
Followers
37.9K
Votes
1.3K
Votes
1.1K
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
  • 305
    Intellisense, ui
  • 244
    Complete ide and debugger
  • 165
    Plug-ins
  • 104
    Integrated
  • 93
    Documentation
Cons
  • 16
    Bulky
  • 14
    Made by Microsoft
  • 6
    Sometimes you need to restart to finish an update
  • 3
    Too much size for disk
  • 3
    Only avalible on Windows
Integrations
Nexmo
Nexmo
Stackdriver
Stackdriver
VMware vSphere
VMware vSphere
Docker
Docker
OpenStack
OpenStack
Amazon EC2
Amazon EC2
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Rackspace Cloud Servers
Google Compute Engine
Google Compute Engine
New Relic
New Relic
PagerDuty
PagerDuty
No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Ansible, Visual Studio?

PhpStorm

PhpStorm

PhpStorm is a PHP IDE which keeps up with latest PHP & web languages trends, integrates a variety of modern tools, and brings even more extensibility with support for major PHP frameworks.

IntelliJ IDEA

IntelliJ IDEA

Out of the box, IntelliJ IDEA provides a comprehensive feature set including tools and integrations with the most important modern technologies and frameworks for enterprise and web development with Java, Scala, Groovy and other languages.

WebStorm

WebStorm

WebStorm is a lightweight and intelligent IDE for front-end development and server-side JavaScript.

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE

NetBeans IDE is FREE, open source, and has a worldwide community of users and developers.

PyCharm

PyCharm

PyCharm’s smart code editor provides first-class support for Python, JavaScript, CoffeeScript, TypeScript, CSS, popular template languages and more. Take advantage of language-aware code completion, error detection, and on-the-fly code fixes!

Eclipse

Eclipse

Standard Eclipse package suited for Java and plug-in development plus adding new plugins; already includes Git, Marketplace Client, source code and developer documentation. Click here to file a bug against Eclipse Platform.

Android Studio

Android Studio

Android Studio is a new Android development environment based on IntelliJ IDEA. It provides new features and improvements over Eclipse ADT and will be the official Android IDE once it's ready.

Chef

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

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.

RubyMine

RubyMine

JetBrains RubyMine IDE provides a comprehensive Ruby code editor aware of dynamic language specifics and delivers smart coding assistance, intelligent code refactoring and code analysis capabilities.

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