Ansible vs Consul

• Agentless. For our implementation, this is the single biggest factor. If we have to touch the machine and install an agent before we can start managing it, that's already too much effort and slows us down.
• Re-entrant. This is not unique to Ansible, but certainly a huge improvement over custom scripts and such. Because it's such a huge effort to make scripts re-entrant, most of our scripts did not allow an elegant way to recover on failure. Manually cleaning up the half-attempt and re-trying is still too cumbersome, and being able to just re-run Ansible is a great improvement!
• Infrastructure as code. This is new to Ansible, and there are still a few minor bugs with their AWS modules, but it's been a huge help being able to define our infrastructure in an Ansible playbook, commit it to source control, and use one tool for all our DevOps tasks.

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• Service Health: Using Consul for service health/discovery has been critical to our success in a hybrid environment
• K/V Store: The Consul K/V store is the best solution out there for our particular use case, which is as a locking mechanism to coordinate otherwise random runs of our configuration management system. This has allowed us to have peace of mind of system availability in our on-prem infrastructure.
• API: The Consul API as a whole is excellent and extremely easy to work with
• Documentation: Hashicorp really does documentation well. Their examples are easy to follow and everything is written in a manner that is easy to understand for beginners with the tool.

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• Unlike Chef, Ansible employes a Push methodology rather than Pull. We found that this doesn't scale well for us, thus we had to consider using Ansible Tower in order to scale.
• Ansible's free training and tutorials do no provide as much depth and ease for first time users trying it out for the first time.
• From the limited experience we have had with Ansible Tower, the UI is not very user friendly. There's a lot of bells and whistles that can prove o be overwhelming at times.

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• We would like to see more out of the box training for Consul use.
• Best practice examples would be nice for routing.
• The agent could be easier to run.

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• We have been able to deploy solutions to client issues without impacting uptime.
• Most system administration tasks have been automated so I am now free to work on architectural improvements or customer support.
• Our customer support has improved thanks to Ansible as it has allowed me more time away from repetitive system activities so I may assist with customer questions and application testing.

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• Consul has paid for itself just in monitoring and keeping us notified alone.
• Configuration changes can be monitored and will make even your Security team smile.
• The time saving tools will help make even a lean IT team work like a larger force.

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