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Ansible VS Chef VS Puppet VS SaltStack
Updated April 27, 2021

Ansible VS Chef VS Puppet VS SaltStack

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ansible

Ansible is used across the entire organization for configuration management. It configures operating systems as well as releases and configures software. We manage our ansible repo in a CI pipeline with jenkins.
  • Ansible works extremely well with Jenkins in a CI pipeline for testing, validating, and configuring VM and container images.
  • Ansible is fully extensible with custom modules. There is also a huge existing official repo of extensions and add-on modules.
  • Ansible runs agentless so all actions are performed via SSH. This means you do not have to install any software on the host you're running Ansible on.
  • Ansible struggles with complex and large inventories. It could greatly improve with improvements to inventory processing.
  • There are no real walk-throughs on how to start with ansible module development
  • It automated processes that used to be performed by hand saving hundreds of hours if not thousands
  • It is self documenting when combined with a source control service. People who understand ansible are able to come up to speed relatively quickly.
All three of these competitors are agent based. I did not want an additional service that needed to run absolutely everywhere. I also did not want to maintain a load balanced cluster of master servers that grows in resource requirements as your infrastructure scales.
Ansible is extremely well suited for full stack configuration management. It is much easier to use against providers like AWS or OpenStack than its counterparts, it works on network devices due to using SSH, and it pairs well with CI systems to keep your repo validated. Ansible is not the fastest kid on the block as far as deployments and task-level execution go. If speed is paramount with your configuration management solution then an agent-based solution is probably the way to go.