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  1. Stackups
  2. DevOps
  3. Continuous Deployment
  4. Server Configuration And Automation
  5. AWX vs Puppet Labs

AWX vs Puppet Labs

OverviewDecisionsComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs
Stacks1.3K
Followers793
Votes227
GitHub Stars7.7K
Forks2.2K
AWX
AWX
Stacks138
Followers259
Votes1
GitHub Stars15.0K
Forks3.6K

AWX vs Puppet Labs: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will compare AWX and Puppet Labs and highlight their key differences in terms of features and functionality.

  1. Installation and Setup: AWX is an open-source tool that can be easily installed on a variety of platforms, providing flexibility for users. On the other hand, Puppet Labs offers a more comprehensive installation process that includes a combination of Puppet Server, Puppet Agent, and PuppetDB.

  2. Configuration Management: AWX specializes in configuring and managing systems using Ansible, a powerful automation tool that allows for easier and faster deployment of configurations. Puppet Labs, on the other hand, provides a more robust and established configuration management framework, enabling users to define, enforce, and manage configurations across multiple systems.

  3. Scalability and Performance: AWX is designed to handle large-scale deployments and can manage a significant number of systems simultaneously. Puppet Labs, on the other hand, excels in scalability and performance, capable of handling complex infrastructures with thousands of nodes efficiently.

  4. Community Support: AWX benefits from a vibrant open-source community, providing access to a vast library of playbooks and modules shared by users. Puppet Labs also has a strong user community, with an extensive collection of pre-built modules and a wealth of community support resources.

  5. Workflow Automation: AWX offers a flexible and customizable workflow engine that allows users to define and automate their workflow processes. Puppet Labs, on the other hand, provides a powerful orchestrator that enables users to automate complex processes, dependencies, and workflows across multiple systems.

  6. User Interface: AWX provides a user-friendly web-based interface that simplifies the management and monitoring of systems, making it easier for non-technical users to interact with the tool. Puppet Labs also offers a web-based interface but with a stronger emphasis on command-line usage, catering to users who prefer more advanced control and flexibility.

In Summary, AWX is an open-source tool focused on Ansible-based configuration management with a user-friendly interface, while Puppet Labs offers a comprehensive configuration management framework with strong scalability and performance capabilities.

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Advice on Puppet Labs, AWX

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

Detailed Comparison

Puppet Labs
Puppet Labs
AWX
AWX

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.

AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is the upstream project for Tower, a commercial derivative of AWX. Ansible Towers powers enterprise automation by adding control, security and delegation capabilities to Ansible environments.

Insight- Puppet Enterprise's event inspector gives immediate and actionable insight into your environment, showing you what changed, where and how by classes, nodes and resources.;Discovery- Puppet Enterprise delivers a dynamic and fully-pluggable discovery service that allows you to take advantage of any data source or real-time query results to quickly locate, identify and group cloud nodes.;Provisioning- Automatically provision and configure bare metal, virtual, and private or public cloud capacity, all from a single pane. Save time getting your cloud projects off the ground by reusing the same configuration modules you set up for your physical deployments.;Configuration Management- Puppet Enterprise's declarative, model-based approach automates repetitive tasks and eliminates configuration drift. You define the desired state of your infrastructure, and Puppet Enterprise enforces this state, freeing you to work on tougher projects.;Orchestration- Quickly deploy critical updates, like security patches, across hundreds of servers in seconds, or proactively initiate Puppet runs to update configurations and report changes. Puppet Enterprise allows you to orchestrate controlled, multi-step operations to targeted collections of nodes, giving you complete control over infrastructure changes.;Reporting- Get visibility into your infrastructure, browse resources, and view reports that help you manage your configuration. Puppet Enterprise provides node hardware and software inventory, Puppet run change reports, and node configuration graphs via the product's console or 3rd party APIs.
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Statistics
GitHub Stars
7.7K
GitHub Stars
15.0K
GitHub Forks
2.2K
GitHub Forks
3.6K
Stacks
1.3K
Stacks
138
Followers
793
Followers
259
Votes
227
Votes
1
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 52
    Devops
  • 44
    Automate it
  • 26
    Reusable components
  • 21
    Dynamic and idempotent server configuration
  • 18
    Great community
Cons
  • 3
    Steep learning curve
  • 1
    Customs types idempotence
Pros
  • 1
    Open source
Integrations
No integrations available
Ansible
Ansible

What are some alternatives to Puppet Labs, AWX?

Ansible

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.

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.

Capistrano

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.

Salt

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

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

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

cPanel

cPanel

It is an industry leading hosting platform with world-class support. It is globally empowering hosting providers through fully-automated point-and-click hosting platform by hosting-centric professionals

Webmin

Webmin

It is a web-based interface for system administration for Unix. Using any modern web browser, you can setup user accounts, Apache, DNS, file sharing and much more. It removes the need to manually edit Unix configuration files.

Mina

Mina

Mina works really fast because it's a deploy Bash script generator. It generates an entire procedure as a Bash script and runs it remotely in the server. Compare this to the likes of Vlad or Capistrano, where each command is run separately on their own SSH sessions. Mina only creates one SSH session per deploy, minimizing the SSH connection overhead.

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