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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#vs-func">vs Func?</a></li>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#vs-puppet">vs Puppet?</a></li>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#vs-chef">vs Chef?</a></li>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#are-transports-other-than-ssh-supported">Are transports other than SSH supported?</a></li>
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<li><a class="reference internal" href="#what-are-some-ideal-uses-for-ansible">What are some ideal uses for Ansible?</a></li>
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<a href="http://github.com/ansible/ansible"><img style="position: absolute; right: 0; border: 0;" src="http://ansible.github.com/github.png" alt="Fork me on GitHub"></a>
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<a href="http://ansible.github.com"><img src="http://ansible.github.com/ansible-logo.png" alt="Ansible"/></a><br/>
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<br/>
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<div class="section" id="faq">
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<h1>FAQ<a class="headerlink" href="#faq" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
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<div class="section" id="what-inspired-ansible">
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<h2>What inspired Ansible?<a class="headerlink" href="#what-inspired-ansible" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
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<p>Back when I worked for Red Hat and working on <a class="reference external" href="http://cobbler.github.com/">Cobbler</a>, several of us identified a gap between
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provisioning (Cobbler) and configuration management solutions (cfengine, Puppet, etc).
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There was a need for a way to do ad-hoc tasks efficiently, and various parallel
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SSH scripts were not API based enough for us. So we (Adrian Likins, Seth Vidal, and I)
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created <a class="reference external" href="http://fedorahosted.org/func">Func</a> – a secure distributed command framework.</p>
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<p>I always wanted to have a configuration management system built on Func, but never
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built it due to needing to spend time on Cobbler and other projects.
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In the meantime, a John Eckersberg developed Taboot,
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a deployment framework of sorts that sat on top of Func, using a YAML syntax very
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much like what Ansible now has in <a class="reference internal" href="playbooks.html"><em>Playbooks</em></a>.</p>
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<p>After trying to get Func running again recently at a new company, I got tired
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of some SSL and DNS issues and decided to create something a bit simpler, taking
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all of the good ideas from Func, and merging them with experience I learned from
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working at Puppet Labs. I wanted something that was easy to pick up and was installable
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without any bootstrapping, and didn’t suffer from the “I don’t want to learn X” mentality
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that often impacted adoption of tools like Puppet and Chef among certain ops teams.</p>
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<p>I also spent some time working with a couple of sites that needed to do large webapp deployments,
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and noticed how complex various configuration management and deployment tools were to these
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companies, compared with what they actually needed. Release processes were too complex
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and needed something simple to straighten them out – but I really didn’t want to train
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all the dev(ops) on Puppet or Chef, and they really didn’t want to learn them either.</p>
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<p>I kept thinking, is there a reason for these programs to be so large and complicated?
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Well, systems management is a little complicated, but no. Not really.</p>
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<p>Can I build something that a sysadmin can
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figure out in 15 minutes and get going, and then extend in any language he knows?
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That’s how Ansible was born. It sheds ‘best practices’ for ‘you know your infrastructure
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best’, and distills all of the ideas behind all of these other tools to the core.</p>
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<p>Not only is Ansible very simple and easy to learn/extend, it’s configuration management, deployment, and ad-hoc tasks all in one app. And I think that makes it pretty powerful. It hasn’t really been done before.</p>
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<p>I’d like to know what you think of it. Hop by the mailing list and say hi.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="comparisons">
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<h2>Comparisons<a class="headerlink" href="#comparisons" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
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<div class="section" id="vs-func">
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<h3>vs Func?<a class="headerlink" href="#vs-func" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>Ansible uses SSH by default instead of SSL and custom daemons, and requires
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no extra software to run on managed machines. You can also write modules
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in any language as long as they return JSON. Ansible’s API, of course, is
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heavily inspired by Func. Ansible also adds
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a configuration management and multinode orchestration layer (<a class="reference internal" href="playbooks.html"><em>Playbooks</em></a>)
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that Func didn’t have.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="vs-puppet">
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<h3>vs Puppet?<a class="headerlink" href="#vs-puppet" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>First off, Ansible wouldn’t have happened without Puppet. Puppet took configuration
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management ideas from cfengine and made them sane. However, I still think they can
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be much simpler.</p>
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<p>Ansible playbooks ARE a complete configuration management system. Unlike Puppet, playbooks
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are implicitly ordered (more like Chef), but still retain the ability to signal
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notification events (like Puppet). This is kind of a ‘best of both worlds’ thing.</p>
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<p>There is no central server subject to thundering herd problems, and Ansible is
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also designed with multi-node deployment in mind from day-one – something that is difficult
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for Puppet because of the pull architecture. Ansible is push based,
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so you can do things in an ordered fashion, addressing batches of servers
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at one time, and you do not have to contend with the dependency graph. It’s also extensible in any language
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and the source is designed so that you don’t have to be an expert programmer to submit a patch.</p>
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<p>Ansible’s resources are heavily inspired by Puppet, with the “state” keyword being a more or less
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direct port of “ensure” from Puppet. Unlike Puppet, Ansible can be extended in any language,
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even bash ... just return some output in JSON format. You don’t need to know Ruby.</p>
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<p>Unlike Puppet, hosts are taken out of playbooks when they have a failure. It encourages
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‘fail first’, so you can correct the error, instead of configuring as much of the system
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as it can. A system shouldn’t be half correct, especially if we’re planning on configuring
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other systems that depend on that system.</p>
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<p>Ansible also has a VERY short learning curve – but it also has less language constructs and
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does not create its own programming language. What constructs Ansible does have should be enough to cover 80% or so of the cases of most Puppet users, and it should scale equally well (not having a server is
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almost like cheating).</p>
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<p>Ansible does support gathering variables from ‘facter’, if installed, and Ansible templates
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in jinja2 in a way just like Puppet does with erb. Ansible also has it’s own facts though,
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so usage of facter is not required to get variables about the system.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="vs-chef">
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<h3>vs Chef?<a class="headerlink" href="#vs-chef" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>Much in the ways Ansible is different from Puppet. Chef is notoriously hard
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to set up on the server, and requires that you know how to program in Ruby to
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use the language. As such, it seems to have a pretty good following mainly
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among Rails coders.</p>
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<p>Like Chef (and unlike Puppet), Ansible executes configuration tasks in the order
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given, rather than having to manually specify a dependency graph. Ansible extends
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this though, by allowing triggered notifiers, so Apache can, be restarted if needed,
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only once, at the end of a configuration run.</p>
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<p>Unlike Chef, Ansible’s playbooks are not a programming language. This means
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that you can parse Ansible’s playbooks and treat the instructions as data. It also
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means working on your infrastructure is not a development task and testing is easier.</p>
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<p>Ansible can be used regardless of your programming language experience. Both
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Chef and Puppet are around 60k+ lines of code, while Ansible is a much simpler
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program. I believe this strongly leads to more reliable software and a richer
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open source community – the code is kept simple so it is easy for anyone to
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submit a patch or module.</p>
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<p>Ansible does support gathering variables from ‘ohai’, if installed. Ansible also
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has it’s own facts so you do not need to use ohai unless you want to.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="vs-capistrano-fabric">
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<h3>vs Capistrano/Fabric?<a class="headerlink" href="#vs-capistrano-fabric" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>These tools aren’t really well suited to doing idempotent configuration and are
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typically about pushing software out for web deployment and automating steps.</p>
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<p>Meanwhile Ansible is designed for other types of configuration management, and contains some
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advanced scaling features.</p>
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<p>The ansible playbook syntax is documented within one HTML page and also has a MUCH lower learning curve.
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And because Ansible is designed for more than pushing webapps, it’s more generally
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useful for sysadmins (not just web developers), and can also be used for firing off ad-hoc tasks.</p>
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</div>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="other-questions">
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<h2>Other Questions<a class="headerlink" href="#other-questions" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
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<div class="section" id="what-is-ansible-s-approach-to-security">
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<h3>What is Ansible’s approach to security?<a class="headerlink" href="#what-is-ansible-s-approach-to-security" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>Ansible aims to not develop custom daemon or PKI code but rely heavily on OpenSSH, which is extremely well
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peer reviewed and the most widely used security subsystem in the industry. As a result, Ansible
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has a lower attack surface than any configuration management tool featuring daemons that run
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as root, and you do not have to worry about network security vulnerabilities in the tool itself.</p>
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<p>If your central server is taken over (or even logged into by a malicious employee),
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provided you were using SSH-agent and encrypted keys (and/or sudo with a password),
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your keys are still locked and no one can take control of your nodes.</p>
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<p>Compared with something like Chef/Puppet/other, compromised manifests would lead
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to a loss of the whole network, with your network turning into an easily controllable
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botnet. Further by not running daemon infrastructure, you have more
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free RAM and compute resources, which should be relevant to users wanting to maximize their
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computing investments.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="how-does-ansible-scale">
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<h3>How does Ansible scale?<a class="headerlink" href="#how-does-ansible-scale" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>Whether in single-execution mode or using ansible playbooks, ansible can
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run multiple commands in seperate parallel forks, thanks to the magic behind
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Python’s multiprocessing module.</p>
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<p>You can decide if you want to try to manage 5 hosts at a time, or 50 at a time.
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It’s up to you and how much power you can throw at it and how fast you want
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to go.</p>
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<p>There are no daemons so it’s entirely up to you. When you are aren’t using
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Ansible, it is not consuming any resources, and you don’t have to contend
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with a herd of machines all knocking at the door of your management server
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all at once.</p>
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<p>The SSH connection type (paramiko is the default, binary openssh is an option)
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can also make use of “ControlMaster” features in SSH, which reuses network
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connections.</p>
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<p>If you have 10,000 systems, running a single ansible playbook against all of
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them probably isn’t appropriate, which is why ansible-pull exists. This tool
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is designed for running out of git and cron, and can scale to any
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number of hosts. Ansible-pull uses local connections versus SSH, but can be
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easily bootstrapped or reconfigured just using SSH. There is more information
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available about this in the <a class="reference internal" href="playbooks2.html"><em>Advanced Playbooks</em></a> section. The self-bootstrapping
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and ease of use are ansible are still retained, even when switching to the pull
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model.</p>
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<p>If you’d like to discuss scaling strategies further, please hop on the mailing list.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="are-transports-other-than-ssh-supported">
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<h3>Are transports other than SSH supported?<a class="headerlink" href="#are-transports-other-than-ssh-supported" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>Currently SSH (you can choose between paramiko or the openssh binaries)
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and local connections are supported. The interface is actually pluggable so a
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small patch could bring transport over message bus or XMPP as an option.</p>
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<p>Stop by the mailing list if you have ideas. The connection-specific parts of Ansible
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are all abstracted away from the core implementation so it is very easy to extend.</p>
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</div>
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<div class="section" id="what-are-some-ideal-uses-for-ansible">
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<h3>What are some ideal uses for Ansible?<a class="headerlink" href="#what-are-some-ideal-uses-for-ansible" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
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<p>One of the best use cases? Complex multi-node cloud deployments using playbooks. Another good
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example is for configuration management where you
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are starting from a clean OS with no extra software installed, adopting systems
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that are already deployed.</p>
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<p>Ansible is also great for running ad-hoc tasks across a wide variety of Linux, Unix, and BSDs.
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Because it just uses the basic tools available on the system, it is exceptionally cross platform
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without needing to install management packages on each node.</p>
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<p>It also excels for writing distributed
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scripts and ad-hoc applications that need to gather data or perform arbitrary
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tasks – whether for a QA sytem, build system, or anything you can think of.</p>
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<div class="admonition-see-also admonition seealso">
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<p class="first admonition-title">See also</p>
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<dl class="last docutils">
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<dt><a class="reference internal" href="examples.html"><em>Command Line</em></a></dt>
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<dd>Examples of basic commands</dd>
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<dt><a class="reference internal" href="playbooks.html"><em>Playbooks</em></a></dt>
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<dd>Learning ansible’s configuration management language</dd>
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<dt><a class="reference external" href="http://groups.google.com/group/ansible-project">Mailing List</a></dt>
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<dd>Questions? Help? Ideas? Stop by the list on Google Groups</dd>
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<dt><a class="reference external" href="http://irc.freenode.net">irc.freenode.net</a></dt>
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<dd>#ansible IRC chat channel</dd>
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</dl>
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© Copyright 2012 Michael DeHaan.<br/>
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Last updated on Jul 25, 2012.<br/>
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