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Puppet Labs vs Rancher: What are the differences?
- Deployment Methodology: Puppet Labs focuses on Configuration Management through declarative code, while Rancher facilitates the management of containerized applications across multiple environments.
- Resource Orchestration: Puppet Labs primarily automates configuration changes across servers, whereas Rancher orchestrates containers and containerized applications.
- Agent vs. Agentless: Puppet Labs uses an agent-based approach, requiring an agent on each node for management, while Rancher is agentless and can manage containers without any additional software on the nodes.
- Scalability: Puppet Labs is suitable for managing large-scale infrastructure with a primary focus on traditional server environments, whereas Rancher excels in managing container-based infrastructures at scale.
- Community Support: Puppet Labs has a large community and extensive library of modules for automation, whereas Rancher has a growing community focusing on container orchestration and management.
- User Interface: Rancher provides a user-friendly web interface for managing containers and clusters, while Puppet Labs primarily interacts through a command-line interface or web console.
In Summary, Puppet Labs and Rancher differ in their primary focus on configuration management versus container orchestration, deployment methodology, resource orchestration, agent vs. agentless approach, scalability, community support, and user interface.
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.
I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.
The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.
If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate
Pros of Puppet Labs
- Devops52
- Automate it44
- Reusable components26
- Dynamic and idempotent server configuration21
- Great community18
- Very scalable12
- Cloud management12
- Easy to maintain10
- Free tier9
- Works with Amazon EC26
- Declarative4
- Ruby4
- Works with Azure3
- Works with OpenStack3
- Nginx2
- Ease of use1
Pros of Rancher
- Easy to use103
- Open source and totally free79
- Multi-host docker-compose support63
- Load balancing and health check included58
- Simple58
- Rolling upgrades, green/blue upgrades feature44
- Dns and service discovery out-of-the-box42
- Only requires docker37
- Multitenant and permission management34
- Easy to use and feature rich29
- Cross cloud compatible11
- Does everything needed for a docker infrastructure11
- Simple and powerful8
- Next-gen platform8
- Very Docker-friendly7
- Support Kubernetes and Swarm6
- Application catalogs with stack templates (wizards)6
- Supports Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, and Kubernetes6
- Rolling and blue/green upgrades deployments6
- High Availability service: keeps your app up 24/76
- Easy to use service catalog5
- Very intuitive UI4
- IaaS-vendor independent, supports hybrid/multi-cloud4
- Awesome support4
- Scalable3
- Requires less infrastructure requirements2
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Cons of Puppet Labs
- Steep learning curve3
- Customs types idempotence1
Cons of Rancher
- Hosting Rancher can be complicated10
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