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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• Consul makes keeping our DNS up to date very simple and easy.
• Configuration changes are a snap when Consul is involved.
• All of our services register easy and we sleep better knowing Consul is on the job.

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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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• When it gracefully dies, it dies too gracefully. Way to graceful to find in a simple way what was wrong.
• Working with the ACLs could be a little simpler.
• I didn't find a native way of configuring it as a circuit breaker. Perhaps that could be an item to be improved in the future.

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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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• It contains a native web UI, which in contrast to its counterparts, is handy, very intuitive and - most importantly - very informative. It leaves no room for doubt about your services "forest" health. So, for that purpose, the learning curve was almost down to non-existent. Our team managed to work seamlessly with Consul being our services API
• Our management staff had a difficult time understanding what Consul was really all about. For technical staff it is pretty simple to understand the huge value such a tool can pose to our suite of solutions, but once our management staff took the grasp of its valuable handy set of tools, we didn't take long to start using it and keeping track of our Swarm overall health, with was a constant concern for the entire company before.
• For load balancing purposes, we were relying pretty much on guesses before we decided to use Consul. One would check a certain node overall health and decide if we would need to spring a new instance at AWS or Digital Ocean.

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