Ansible as an alternative to the Puppet configuration tool

Big and Small

System administrators love harking back to the good old days when IT setups consisted of a manageable number of servers that you could easily maintain manually. On today's networks, admins and hosting providers sometimes look after thousands of hosts.

Manual work is no longer economically feasible: Tools for configuration management and automation are essential for many networks. Most admins are familiar with popular solutions such as Puppet [1] and Chef [2]. Although the Puppet configuration management tool has many supports, some sys admins regularly curse it. Many users believe Puppet is too complex, and some complain that the tool has moved too far away from its original ideals.

Many users who want configuration management but want to avoid the complications associated with Puppet have turned to Ansible [3]. The Ansible configuration tool promises automation with a learning curve that is much shorter than Puppet's – and without compromising quality.

Puppet

Even back in the old days, when every server was hand-reared, admins still occasionally had the need to keep configuration files for individual services synchronized across multiple servers. Networks began to deploy tools such as Rsync or SCP to keep configuration files synchronized, but it quickly became apparent that these approaches were hacks.

When the first version of Puppet arrived in 2005, the promise of the developers seemed to be revolutionary: Puppet could distribute configuration files that were stored and maintained at a central location to all the servers on the network.

Puppet soon added additional features that allowed it to do much more than just roll out files: It could also call individual files on the servers to perform tasks such as