Ansible vs Selenium

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Ansible vs Selenium: What are the differences?

Ansible and Selenium are both automation tools used in software development and operations. However, they have several key differences that set them apart.

  1. Implementation: Ansible is a configuration management tool used for automating the deployment and management of software applications. It uses a declarative approach, where users define the desired state of the system, and Ansible handles the execution of tasks to achieve that state. On the other hand, Selenium is a testing framework primarily used for automating web browsers. It uses a script-based approach, where users write code to interact with web elements and perform actions.

  2. Target Audience: Ansible is mainly targeted towards system administrators and DevOps engineers who manage and deploy software on a large scale. It focuses on infrastructure automation and orchestration. Selenium, on the other hand, is primarily aimed at software testers and developers who need to automate web browser testing. It focuses on functional and regression testing of web applications.

  3. Scope of Automation: Ansible is designed for automating tasks related to system configuration, provisioning, and deployment. It can manage a wide range of systems, including servers, networking devices, and cloud resources. Selenium, on the other hand, is specifically designed for automating web browser interactions. It can simulate user actions like clicking buttons, entering text, and validating web page content.

  4. Language Support: Ansible uses a YAML-based configuration language, which is easy to read and write for system administrators. It also supports running scripts written in languages like Python and PowerShell. Selenium primarily supports scripting in languages like Java, Python, C#, and Ruby. This allows developers to choose a language they are comfortable with for writing test scripts.

  5. Execution Mode: Ansible runs tasks in a push-based model, where the control node sends commands to the target nodes over SSH and executes them remotely. It allows for parallel execution and can manage multiple nodes simultaneously. Selenium, on the other hand, runs tests in a script-based model, where the test code is executed sequentially by controlling the web browser instance.

In Summary, Ansible is a configuration management tool focused on infrastructure automation, while Selenium is a testing framework for web browser automation. Ansible uses a declarative approach, targets system administrators and DevOps engineers, and supports a wide range of systems. Selenium uses a script-based approach, targets software testers and developers, and focuses on automating web browser interactions.

Advice on Ansible and Selenium
Needs advice
on
JestJestSeleniumSelenium
and
WebdriverIOWebdriverIO
in

we are having one web application developed in Reacts.js. in the application, we have only 4 to 5 pages that we need to test. I am having experience in selenium with java. Please suggets which tool I should use. and why ............................ ............................ .............................

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Replies (1)
Prashanth Marappa
Senior Software Engineer at Mphasis · | 1 upvotes · 213.4K views
Recommends
on
SeleniumSelenium

with the help of selenium we can automate react js for functional testing

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Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

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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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

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.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

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

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Pros of Ansible
Pros of Selenium
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
  • 69
    Flexible
  • 55
    Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
  • 35
    Makes sense
  • 30
    Super efficient and flexible
  • 27
    Powerful
  • 11
    Dynamic Inventory
  • 9
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 6
    Cloud Oriented
  • 6
    Easy to maintain
  • 4
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 4
    Simple and powerful
  • 4
    Multi language
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Because SSH
  • 4
    Procedural or declarative, or both
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Consistency
  • 2
    Well-documented
  • 2
    Masterless
  • 2
    Debugging is simple
  • 2
    Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
  • 2
    Fast as hell
  • 1
    Manage any OS
  • 1
    Work on windows, but difficult to manage
  • 1
    Certified Content
  • 175
    Automates browsers
  • 154
    Testing
  • 101
    Essential tool for running test automation
  • 24
    Record-Playback
  • 24
    Remote Control
  • 8
    Data crawling
  • 7
    Supports end to end testing
  • 6
    Easy set up
  • 6
    Functional testing
  • 4
    The Most flexible monitoring system
  • 3
    End to End Testing
  • 3
    Easy to integrate with build tools
  • 2
    Comparing the performance selenium is faster than jasm
  • 2
    Record and playback
  • 2
    Compatible with Python
  • 2
    Easy to scale
  • 2
    Integration Tests
  • 0
    Integrated into Selenium-Jupiter framework

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Cons of Ansible
Cons of Selenium
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 2
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 8
    Flaky tests
  • 4
    Slow as needs to make browser (even with no gui)
  • 1
    Update browser drivers

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What is 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.

What is Selenium?

Selenium automates browsers. That's it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) also be automated as well.

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What are some alternatives to Ansible and Selenium?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
See all alternatives