Ansible vs Consul

Ansible

I would recommend Ansible to anyone, but I recognize it might not fit everyone's needs. I'm not as familiar with Chef, Puppet, or Salt, but they each have their strengths. For us, we needed to be able to manage a new server the moment it was created, so agent-based solutions were out. For our use, Ansible does everything we've asked it to.

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John Grosjean

DevOps Engineer

AviziaHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Consul

Consul is well suited for both SMB as well as enterprise environments. I have found it to be a robust scalable tool to help make our company more efficient. Consul excels in a single database or a multi-database environment which makes searches easier. Small businesses might find this a bit overkill as a product but it can still benefit them.

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Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager

Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Pros

Unlike Puppet or Chef, Ansible doesn’t use an agent on the remote host. Instead it uses SSH which is to be installed on all the systems we want to manage.
Ansible is written in Python, which we install on all remote host. This means that we don’t have to setup a client server environment before using Ansible.
Ansible can work alongside our other DevOp tool, Chef. This allows us to reach out to existing Chef teams in order to try and organize their work all under the same DevOps umbrella.

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Hospital & Health Care Company, 10,001+ employees

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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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Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager

Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Cons

Python 2.7 was required for the older versions
SSH as a requirement by default
Not as fast as container driven development

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Blagovest Petrov

DevOps Engineer

VeriosoftComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees

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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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Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager

Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Performance

Ansible7.5

Based on 2 answers

Out of the box, Ansible can be slow over a bad connection, as it's establishing an SSH connection to the target server for each little task. There are some adjustments you can make to the defaults that greatly improve performance. And if you run Ansible on the same network as the target (i.e. by using a jump box or Jenkins server), then it can be crazy fast. I'd give it a 10 for speed except that it does require these adjustments first.

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John Grosjean

DevOps Engineer

AviziaHospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees

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Alternatives Considered

In the time of integration, we chose Ansible instead of Puppet because it was simpler to use, based on Python and didn't require additional server environments to run. Of course, there are a lot of different alternatives like Chef or Salt Stack.

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Blagovest Petrov

DevOps Engineer

VeriosoftComputer Software, 5001-10,000 employees

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Consul was easier to configure out of the box than Serf and gave us more initial options. Its easy to use tools and support were by far superior to Serf in many ways. Support alone was one of those areas that Serf could take an example from Consul to keep its customers happy.

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Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager

Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

Very positive given the fact it's free and helps me to adapt to new environments very fast and easily

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Verified User

Engineer in Engineering

Computer Software Company, 11-50 employees

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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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Eric Krueger

Operations/Systems Manager

Crowell SystemsComputer Software, 51-200 employees

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