StarAgile
Jul 05, 2024
4,008
20 mins
Configuration management (CM) is the method of ensuring that all the assets of the organization are identified, managed, controlled, and tracked at all times, and any future changes to these assets are also tracked.
This was a manual task completed by the System Administrators. The role was tedious and cumbersome and need a lot of time and effort. This was easy in managing less than 5 to 10 assets, gets increasingly complex and difficult if we have to manage hundreds of assets.
Some of the benefits of CM are as follows,
Disaster Recovery - If anything worst happens to the assets with the new configuration then we can get back to the old configurations. It also applies to rollbacks. Especially important when we put bad code and we can go back to the status before the changes.
Uptime and site reliability - The site reliability means how much of the time the assets are up and running. There are some organizations where even seconds of downtime would cause a loss of millions of dollars. This happens due to bad deployments that can be caused if the platforms are different in test and production servers. With the CM done properly, the test environments are the same as the production environments.
Easier Scaling - We can add more resources to the applications that are running with CM done correctly. For example, if we want to add more servers to the existing application then it becomes very easy just a click of a button or running an automation script.
Some of the other benefits of CM are an excellent collaboration between the teams and improved software lifecycle of products or assets.
The challenges of CM are removed in DevOps life cycle management with the help of DevOps tools such as Fabric, SaltStack, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, etc.
To learn more about DevOps tools undergo training at the StarAgile institute for DevOps Online Course.
Chef is the CM tool used to automate the infrastructure provisioning. It is written in Ruby DSL language and is the open source software developed by Adam Jacob founder of Opscode. It has the features to integrate with any of the cloud technology.
It is used to deploy, manage applications, servers both on-premises and on the cloud both of them in DevOps.
The features of the chef are,
The advantages of chef are it uses domain-specific language which can be written by anyone who has some knowledge of coding
It also used widely in the provisioning and deployment of servers, apps, and other infrastructures on the cloud
Ansible is a tool used in configuration management, application deployment, and cloud provisioning and orchestration services.
It is used for multi-tier deployments and manages a host of systems in one go by inter-relating each one.
Unlike other configuration management tools, it does not have agents and no custom security software. It uses simple English like language YAML in the form of playbooks.
Features of Ansible are
Other benefits are it can be used for ad-hoc parallel task execution, the playbook is the powerful automation language and Ansible can be extended by more plug-ins, API, and modules.
To learn the best of tools in DevOps register for DevOps training at StarAgile institute.
To learn both Chef and Ansible register for DevOps online certification with StarAgile institute.
Serial# | Criteria | Chef | Ansible |
1 | Scalability | Scalable deployment is difficult due to massive Ruby DSL code | Scalability is efficient as installing python interpreter and root access SSH s simple |
2 | Product capabilities |
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3 | Pricing | The starting price of a standard hosted chef plan is $72 yearly for every node The automation version cost $137 per node yearly | The starting price of the self-support package is $5000/year. The Premium version costs $140/year for each node |
4 | Management | Support for pull configuration only | Support both the pull and push |
5 | Interoperability | Support pull configuration only | Ansible server supports only Unix/Linux machine but the client machines support windows |
6 | Ease of setup and installation | Chef workstation makes consumes time and complicated too | Easy |
7 | Accessibility | Chef clients can only configure the clients and server | SSH allows configuration only on specific nodes |
8 | Configuration Language | Ruby DSL | Yet another Markup Language Python |
9 | Availability | Backup Server | Secondary Instance |
Conclusion – Do you want to learn Chef or Ansible
Now you know the difference between the Chef and Ansible as well as which has what features to be used for in DevOps. If you want to know which one is better, then there is no simple answer to it. It entirely depends on the work you are doing, your assets, the infrastructure you want to manage, and a lot of benefits and features that you need for each one of the tools.
However, you must know that both have their place in configuration management and has additional features plus some benefits. You as DevOps architect must decide which one to use when and in which project.
For some DevOps project, the Ansible may be a better choice it depends on how well you analyze, and for some DevOps project, the Chef may be a better choice. The decision must be based on the assets or the infrastructure that you study.
As an aspiring DevOps professional you must learn both and you can take up the DevOps certification course with StarAgile institute. StarAgile offers DevOps Online Training that is interactive and covers both lab and theory sessions.
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