Apache Ant vs Chef

Overview

Chef

Stacks1.3K

Followers1.1K

Votes345

Apache Ant

Stacks250

Followers151

Votes7

GitHub Stars449

Forks449

Apache Ant vs Chef: What are the differences?

What is Apache Ant? Java based build tool. Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.

What is Chef? Build, destroy and rebuild servers on any public or private cloud. 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.

Apache Ant can be classified as a tool in the "Java Build Tools" category, while Chef is grouped under "Server Configuration and Automation".

Some of the features offered by Apache Ant are:

The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.
Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators
Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command

On the other hand, Chef provides the following key features:

Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks
Integration with Leading Cloud Providers
Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris

"Flexible" is the primary reason why developers consider Apache Ant over the competitors, whereas "Dynamic and idempotent server configuration" was stated as the key factor in picking Chef.

Apache Ant and Chef are both open source tools. It seems that Chef with 5.86K GitHub stars and 2.36K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Apache Ant with 247 GitHub stars and 254 GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Chef has a broader approval, being mentioned in 360 company stacks & 80 developers stacks; compared to Apache Ant, which is listed in 24 company stacks and 12 developer stacks.

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Advice on Chef, Apache Ant

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

Chef	Apache Ant
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.	Ant is a Java-based build tool. In theory, it is kind of like Make, without Make's wrinkles and with the full portability of pure Java code.
Access to 800+ Reusable Cookbooks;Integration with Leading Cloud Providers;Enterprise Platform Support including Windows and Solaris;Create, Bootstrap and Manage OpenStack Clouds;Easy Installation with 'one-click' Omnibus Installer;Automatic System Discovery with Ohai;Text-Based Search Capabilities;Multiple Environment Support;"Knife" Command Line Interface;"Dry Run" Mode for Testing Potential Changes;Manage 10,000+ Nodes on a Single Chef Server;Available as a Hosted Service;Centralized Activity and Resource Reporting;"Push" Command and Control Client Runs;Multi-Tenancy;Role-Based Access Control [RBAC];High Availability Installation Support and Verification;Centralized Authentication Using LDAP or Active Directory	The most complete Java build and deployment tool available.;Platform neutral and can handle platform specific properties such as file separators;Can be used to perform platform specific tasks such as modifying the modified time of a file using 'touch' command;Scripts are written using plain XML. If you are already familiar with XML, you can learn pretty quickly;Automate complicated repetitive tasks;Interface to develop custom tasks;Can be easily invoked from the command line and it can integrate with free and commercial IDEs
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 449
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 449
Stacks 1.3K	Stacks 250
Followers 1.1K	Followers 151
Votes 345	Votes 7
Pros & Cons
Pros 110 Dynamic and idempotent server configuration 76 Reusable components 47 Integration testing with Vagrant 43 Repeatable 30 Mock testing with Chefspec	Pros 4 Flexible 1 Simple 1 Easy to learn 1 Easy to write own java-build-hooks Cons 1 Slow 1 Old and not widely used anymore
Integrations
Amazon EC2 Rackspace Cloud Servers Microsoft Azure HP Cloud Compute Joyent Cloud	No integrations available

What are some alternatives to Chef, Apache Ant?

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.

Apache Maven

Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.

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.

Gradle

Gradle is a build tool with a focus on build automation and support for multi-language development. If you are building, testing, publishing, and deploying software on any platform, Gradle offers a flexible model that can support the entire development lifecycle from compiling and packaging code to publishing web sites.

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.

Bazel

Bazel is a build tool that builds code quickly and reliably. It is used to build the majority of Google's software, and thus it has been designed to handle build problems present in Google's development environment.

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

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