Ansible is simple and powerful
May 25, 2018

Ansible is simple and powerful

Edward Larkey | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Ansible

Ansible allows us to manage our systems with over SSH with an easy to read YAML format. It is easy to check playbooks into source control to share with others in the organization. Ansible playbooks are easy and quick to develop. The speed at which we can create new playbooks ensures that more of our systems will use configuration management.
  • Communication over SSH
  • YAML syntax
  • Python modules
  • More difficult than something like Chef to enforce a source of truth or official playbooks in an organization
  • Ansible AWX isn't quite there yet
  • Easy concepts allow us to bring new employees up to speed quickly
  • Ansible makes adding configuration management to existing servers painless, adding more consistency to deployments quickly
  • Writing Ansible playbooks is much quicker to iterate over during development than writing Chef cookbooks.
  • Chef
Chef seems slow to develop with and there are lots of moving pieces associated with it. Ansible is much simpler and easier to get started with while having the same powerful modules to manage infrastructure.
I would 100% recommend Ansible over Chef or other config management systems. Ansible is easy to get started with, has powerful modules, the community provided playbooks, and requires no client package. Great for large-scale deployments and single node apps alike.