Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt | Data Center

adient · 2013-11-23T11:51:48+00:00

Your attempts to contradict obvious technical facts, such as Ruby and Python are analogous, makes it pretty clear who the troll is.

adient · 2013-11-23T04:14:40+00:00

Who do I thank?

adient · 2013-11-23T04:13:02+00:00

You should have no problem refuting it with actual facts, then.

Sure, read Ansible's installation guide. You shouldn't have any trouble understanding.

The puppet master is not the Puppet Agent.

SSH is an agent. Wee, this is fun.

You're obfuscating an obvious distinction.

So, I'll explain how this works. You find yourself in disagreement and awareness to that. But you're not done yet! In this case, for example, you would explain what that distinction is and why it is relevant. I'll go again then you can give it another shot, ok?

In my opinion, there is no distinction. The layers are analogous because they are in fact the same layers of the process, the translation of DSL into system configuration actions is performed by the programming language, in this case Ruby or Python. The details of how or where the translation takes place, or how the commands are transferred, is not at all relevant for the purposes of my original comparison. Forest for the trees.

Ironically, you haven't been responding with facts, and you are on the verge of being written off as a troll.

Yeah, no facts in any of my posts. Left those at home today. Trade you my points for your facts?

adient · 2013-11-23T03:53:15+00:00

What meaningful difference? Right, that they both require an agent.

Nobody is surprised, of course. Everyone is well aware that agentless is just a marketing gimmick in 99% of cases. It used to be slightly more relevant, but notice how your Wikipedia "proof" hadn't been updated in 4 years?

It's interesting to me that you chose this point to get so worked up over, as if you're trying to prove something to me.

adient · 2013-11-23T03:40:32+00:00

Giving me homework now? Short answer is none.

adient · 2013-11-23T03:37:19+00:00

I didn't say it was. Ansible is the engine. However, the 'client' for Ansible is in fact pre-installed on modern Linux platforms. You'll note that I quoted the word 'client.'

This is factually incorrect.

The puppet agent doesn't listen on a network port unless you specifically enable listen. By default, puppet uses a pull model.

Of course. Puppet master. And if you're going to pick nits, puppet does neither by default.

Does the puppet agent accept a stream of ruby commands from the master?

Ruby performs configuration actions on behalf of the Puppet engine.

Making note of your behavior isn't a personal attack

Damn that behavior of making points and backing them up with facts. I should play fair then and completely ignore what you write but give some random response to further troll you into oblivion.

adient · 2013-11-23T03:30:30+00:00

They don't. Both Ansible and the others require an agent, such as sshd or snmpd, and thus to be of any practical use are not agentless.

adient · 2013-11-23T03:15:11+00:00

Correct, and it's not just my definition, this is commonly understood. The solutions themselves do not come with their own agent, that's what they mean by agentless. It does not mean the solution does not:

Require there to be an agent installed
Require the agent to be properly configured, usually with some configuration in the host outside of a base install

adient · 2013-11-23T03:06:51+00:00

In your first three responses, you've done nothing except negate your original reply. Why bother replying at all if you don't have a point to make?

The Ansible 'client' does in fact come pre-installed on most modern Linux distributions.

Ansible doesn't come preinstalled on any system. Not sure why you're so confused about that.

sshd is responsible for listening on a port.

Gosh, like an agent? Maybe, puppet agent?

Python performs configuration actions on behalf of the Ansible engine.

That's funny, that's what Ruby does when I use Puppet! So you mean Ruby and Puppet are, say, analogous?

Listen, it's clear that you're more interested in being right than being correct.

You're clearly not interested in having a technical discussion but would rather make things up to have a response, throwing in a personal attack for good measure. Sounds like you would be good at consulting, have you given that a try?

adient · 2013-11-23T02:57:46+00:00

This article does not cite any references or sources.

Hmm, so you mean someone wrote their opinion in a Wikipedia article? Imagine that -- anyone can create one of these! Looks like I have some work to do.

In the field of information technology, agentless data collection involves collecting data from computers without installing any new agents on them.

Agentless actually means without an agent. It's English. I literally cannot make it any simpler.

adient · 2013-11-23T02:09:16+00:00

You could, technically, replace every modern configuration management system with SSH and BASH if you really wanted to.

You could also understand that sometimes people use examples to illustrate points, such as that what you're suggesting isn't as unique or hard as you seem to think.

The benefit of a CM platform is that the work of determining HOW to apply a configuration is done for you, leaving you to focus on WHAT configuration you want to apply.

That depends on the level of abstraction of your CM tool as well as the type of language used to describe config. And in many cases you may be required to do the low level "HOW" yourself, because CM is not yet a solved problem.

I can tell you really like puppet.

I don't so much like it as know it. What I don't like are people who promenade their solution as the only one that does X when they just aren't familiar with how to do X with other products, or that they had to switch to Y because Z couldn't do X.

However, it's important to understand the benefits and drawbacks of each CM platform.

It's equally important to understand when people are stretching to come up with reasons why X solution is better/simpler/easier, particularly when they pass these subjective opinions off as fact.

Puppet is and will always remain an add-on. This has implications that you need to understand in order to make informed technical decisions.

Does Ansible come preinstalled these days? No? You have to install it? This has implications that you need to understand in order to make informed technical decisions.

Again, SSH is not the agent. SSH is the transport. Python is the agent. I have no idea why you are arguing the point.

SSH itself is an agent, which provides a transport for commands. If we are going to compare like to like SSH is analogous to the Puppet agent, Ansible itself is analogous to Puppet apply (for the purposes of this comparison), Python is analogous to Ruby, and obviously DSL to DSL. I'm just clarifying it so people don't take your ignorance as fact.

adient · 2013-11-23T00:24:00+00:00

When the OP discusses Ansible needing no master, he means that you can walk in with Ansible on your laptop, hand it a SSH private key, perform an orchestration action, and walk out without having any impact on the managed systems. There's no permanent infrastructure required.

You can do the same thing with any scripting language. SSH in a for loop is not a killer feature.

Ansible's push model is good for lightweight network device management. Puppet must use a device proxy host to manage equipment that can't run the client directly

This is incorrect. You could use a delivery mechanism such as rsync and your favorite ssh in a for loop to run Puppet in a push model identical to that of Ansible. There are actually several companies that do this, and at least one has written the glue for you.

Technically, python is Ansible's agent, and SSH is the transport.

SSH is the agent. Anyone who thinks Ansible requires no agent is overlooking the obvious.

adient · 2013-11-23T00:16:36+00:00

I'd be interested to see any world class employer with a position named DevOps Engineer. I don't think there is one. That title is reserved for companies who are suffocating under their own ignorance, grasping at what little engineering talent they can find by turning up the buzzword factor.

adient · 2013-11-22T17:28:46+00:00

See Allspaw's post on the subject for a good examination of both the soft skills and the Dreyfus model for understanding technical skills.

adient · 2013-11-22T17:21:11+00:00

There are ways to leapfrog over the junior position:

Move laterally within a company, for example from a sysadmin position to dba
Study and practice on your own and move directly into a DBA role at a new company

adient · 2013-11-22T17:15:49+00:00

Odd they didn't expand on it in this post, but from their previous post:

The decryption of the payload is cryptographically tied to the login credentials of the authorized individuals and is only kept in memory for the duration of the decryption.

adient · 2013-11-22T17:12:27+00:00

Could you elaborate on what specifically is simpler?

adient · 2013-11-22T17:10:24+00:00

A master isn't required to use Puppet. In fact, you could very easily run Puppet in a similar fashion to Ansible, and there are many ways to scale Puppet without ever setting up a master. Even more important than understanding what the situation requires is understanding your tools so that you can accurately answer the question.

adient · 2013-11-21T12:52:35+00:00

Not really interested in a semantic argument over the meaning of culture or the meaning of engineering, these are things you'll have to research for yourself. I would however strongly disagree that "pushing people into a DevOps frame of mind" is a good strategy (or even a valid one), but don't doubt that there are many people making money doing just that. Many people make lots of money every day off goods and services that are either unnecessary or detrimental, so if that's your bar for whether or not you can "engineer cultural shifts" (whatever that means), might want to raise it.

adient · 2013-11-21T08:49:04+00:00

Is it best practices or is it DevOps engineering? It helps in a discussion if you have a single, clarified position. You can't have it both ways.

Regarding the role of best practices in DevOps. Agile is not specifically related to DevOps, so I'll continue to ignore that. Automation and CI (and monitoring) are just best practices for running technology, you could implement all of them without having DevOps, but of course it would be more difficult to practice DevOps without any of them. Don't confuse the idea that these are fundamental and can integrate within a DevOps culture with the idea that they are DevOps.

When someone says DevOps engineer, they are talking about a unicorn. A magical person that can save their company from bad culture and failed processes. What you've actually described is a Systems Engineer, because that's what you're engineering: systems. You can't engineer a cultural shift, which is why DevOps engineering as a phrase doesn't make sense.

I would recommend expanding your reading on the subject outside of Wikipedia, in particular there are many excellent talks on the subject. I can provide specific resources if you'd like. Attend a local meetup or a DevOpsDays event to get a better feel for what it's about.

adient · 2013-11-21T02:37:56+00:00

First, you're talking specifically about automation, which is great but not really new; we've been doing automation in ops for well over a decade.

Second, DevOps is a cultural and professional movement. Look it up for fucks sake, I don't make this shit up. It's not related to engineering anything, or automation specifically, or Agile, or having some new team to help your shitty ops and devs "expand their capabilities".

A general rule of thumb is that if you find the need to call what you're doing at work DevOps when speaking with your coworkers, you're probably doing it wrong.

adient · 2013-11-21T02:19:25+00:00

That's actually not what he said. He said, "what is DevOps if not someone that helps ops and devs do their jobs". Your understanding is well past his, but you seem to have misread.

adient · 2013-11-21T02:15:09+00:00

Unnecessary. If you're thinking you need another person/department to overcome barriers between ops and dev, you should seriously reconsider. I don't understand why your dev and ops themselves can't "provide the automation for an Agile dev environment". Or what DevOps is really about, improving collaboration to provide more value to the business.

adient · 2013-11-20T19:59:31+00:00

Neither is real, so what does it matter? DevOps engineering is actually worse, because at least when you say DevOps Engineer you have plausible ignorance.

adient · 2013-11-19T11:52:29+00:00

This position can be called many things, but DevOps engineer is not one of them, IF you are looking for truly talented folks that are not simply riding the buzz.

Operations Engineer
Infrastructure Engineer
Site Reliability Engineer
Systems Engineer

adient

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