www.scalr.com Chef, Puppet and Ansible all solve a similar problem - better software through IT automation. While some enterprises attend to their automation needs with a combination of tools, there’s usually a favorite. Join us as we go through an in-depth comparison of the leading IT automation tools and examine different use cases. We’ll talk about how IT automation looks like as a part of a Cloud Management solution. Join us to learn about: The differences between Chef, Puppet and Ansible Who’s best at what - which use case make each tool shine How you can use Scalr + your tool of choice to create application lifecycle policies

1. Chef, Puppet, & Ansible -
Comparing Leading Configuration
Systems
February 15th, 2017
Ron Harnik - Product Marketing Mgr
Alex Green - Technical Content Writer

2. Introduction
Alex Green
Technical Content Writer
Ron Harnik
Product Marketing Manager

3. Agenda
• What are Orchestration Systems?
• Chef, Puppet & Ansible - an overview
• Demonstrate use cases for orchestration systems

4. Scalr Architecture

5. Enterprise Scopes

6. Configuration Systems
• This isn’t just writing scripts: Use dev. best practices like
version control, testing, batched deployments, use of
design patterns
• Falls under Infrastructure As Code (Iaas): writing code to
provision and manage your servers in addition to
automating processes.

7. Why Configuration Systems?
• Reproduce a server for scaling or testing
• Build systems to be platform independent
• Clearly defined software/scripts
• Dynamic configurations

8. Why Configuration Systems?
• Automatically configure monitoring when new systems
are built
• Recover from a disaster quickly (by defining proper
application state should be)
• Get new employees up to speed quickly

9. Consider
• Heavy planning prior to implementation such as choosing
the right tools
• Bad configurations could get duplicated on all the servers
• Configuration drift - when server configurations are
modified through hot-fixes without modifying the
templates)
• Maintaining strict discipline isn’t easy

10. Chef
• Released in 2009
• Written in Ruby - great for Developers and DevOps to
finally get along
• The most popular of the orchestration/automation tools
on the market
• Strong community and collection of resources (Chef
Supermarket)

11. Chef
Good:
• Easier to get productive and stay productive
• Ideal for complex infrastructure work
Bad:
• Chef takes onboarding time.
• Collaboration doesn't scale well.
• Runlist ordering can get messy

12. Ansible
• Released in 2012
• Agentless structure
• Super simple to use - written in python
• Designed to be light

13. Ansible Playbook Structure

14. Ansible
Good:
• Great for single point in time changes
• Time to value is great - helps users define infrastructure
faster
• Streamline the mundane tasks that sysadmins have to
endure
Bad:
• Because over SSH, slow at scale

15. Puppet
• Released in 2005
• Built for the enterprise, incredible support
• Uses Client/Server Architecture like Chef
• Puppet Master + Puppet Agents

16. Puppet Enterprise UI

17. Puppet
Good:
• Like Chef, Puppet is definitely the DevOps tool to define
and deploy company infrastructure to new servers
• Tons of modules
• Scales across teams well
Bad:
• Hard to pick up and experiment with
• compared to chef, the terminology was more complicated

18. Thank You!
If you have any questions or feedback on using these
configuration management systems feel free to reach out to
us at alexg@scalr.com and ron@scalr.com.