Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet
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As a part of the on-going edumacation that is life, I've been interested in, but have never picked up either Ansible or Chef or Puppet, partly because I really don't see where any solution fits in and the remainder of I'm not sure where to begin with any solution.
Now I'm not looking for opinion pieces here, but guidance like "starting with X is easier when using tools XY and Z deployed as such".
Thanks
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Ansible is probably the easiest of all configuration management solutions. All you need is Unix machine to start, you don't even need anything on devices you're going to manage, just access with ssh. And ansible syntax is yaml, so very easy to get started. I believe Salt uses yaml too, but it requires agents on machines you're going to manage. Chef and Puppet are a different beasts, very steep learning curve.
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Puppet would be the hardest of those, by a bit.
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Ansible is what I would start with first. When I was having some weird issue with Salt, I was using Ansible has fallback and I think was easier to pickup and run with it.
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@black3dynamite why was ansible easier to begin with?
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Wasn't Tower going open source instead of paid as well? If I remember that correctly, that should make Ansible+Tower easy. I've only used salt so far, so really have no idea.
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@travisdh1 said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
Wasn't Tower going open source instead of paid as well? If I remember that correctly, that should make Ansible+Tower easy. I've only used salt so far, so really have no idea.
Yeah it's the AWX project. https://www.ansible.com/products/awx-project/faq
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Ansible for sure.
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@DustinB3403 said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
@black3dynamite why was ansible easier to begin with?
The syntax was easier to managing Windows at was easier to adopt my salt setup with it.
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It took me quite a long time to get through the initial Puppet tutorials. And even then I was missing important pieces that should be used on any production setups. After that Salt was really easy to pick up. I haven't tried Ansible, but people always seem to say it is the easiest.
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@flaxking said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
It took me quite a long time to get through the initial Puppet tutorials. And even then I was missing important pieces that should be used on any production setups. After that Salt was really easy to pick up. I haven't tried Ansible, but people always seem to say it is the easiest.
Ansible is a more simple machine, because it only has one piece. But SaltStack is actually the easiest to read and use.
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@Obsolesce said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
@flaxking said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
It took me quite a long time to get through the initial Puppet tutorials. And even then I was missing important pieces that should be used on any production setups. After that Salt was really easy to pick up. I haven't tried Ansible, but people always seem to say it is the easiest.
Ansible is a more simple machine, because it only has one piece. But SaltStack is actually the easiest to read and use.
It's probably hard for me to truely evaluate how much easier Salt is than Puppet, since Puppet was my intro to CM, and jinja/python was where I had previous experience. But every piece of Salt just feels like more of the same. Once you're familiar with the basics and the documentation, learning to use another piece of it is no big deal.
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I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
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@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
What led you to believe that?
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@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
What do you mean?
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@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
I think more the other way around. Containers are important, but mostly hype. At least app containers like you are talking about. Full containers are best managed by CM. CM and containers are a perfect pairing.
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@flaxking said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
It took me quite a long time to get through the initial Puppet tutorials. And even then I was missing important pieces that should be used on any production setups. After that Salt was really easy to pick up. I haven't tried Ansible, but people always seem to say it is the easiest.
Same experience here. Started in cfEngine and Chef. Then going to Salt and Ansible was like "whoa, this is SO easy".
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@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
Containers are usually managed with CM, so this statement doesn't make much sense. Containers will probably become obsolete long before CM will.
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@marcinozga said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
Containers are usually managed with CM, so this statement doesn't make much sense. Containers will probably become obsolete long before CM will.
Exactly, CM is the language of containers. Containers actually make CM even more important.
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@scottalanmiller said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
@Emad-R said in Which is easier to learn Ansible or Chef or Puppet:
I truly think containers will make CM obsolete. If not already.
I think more the other way around. Containers are important, but mostly hype. At least app containers like you are talking about. Full containers are best managed by CM. CM and containers are a perfect pairing.
If a server container is immutable, then why would there be need to actively manage the live configuration?
But there will always be servers it doesn't make sense to make immutable.
And, at least on more heavyweight containers, there's no guarantee that the configuration hasn't changed. Although it would seem unlikely. So it's not truely immutable.
The whole container/CM thing is kind of at a weird place right now. With containers, we've sort of migrated back to the golden image thing, just with the pressure to create an image using a config file. I don't really like images on docker hub that don't have links to the dockerfile.
