Ansible is a powerful tool for automation to the provision of the target environment and to then deploy the application. Jenkins is a popular tool for IT automation and used for Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to provision the target environment.
What is the Difference Between Jenkins And Ansible?
Ansible is a product of RedHat. Ansible is an open-source tool for service employment. It is a solution for software provisioning, application deployment, and configuration management. You can automate multiple IT processes by using Ansible. There are no requirements for setting up separate management structures. Ansible makes troubleshooting deployment easy by providing that all the necessary preparations are done.
Jenkins is an open-source CI server built with Java for automation and Continuous Integration tasks. Users can create and test projects while integrating changes quickly. Jenkins also has a large number of plugins which work well with CI/CD tools. These allow Jenkins to integrate with other softwares and enhance its capabilities. Jenkins can integrate the entire development life-cycle process of an application. It can handle creation, testing, packaging, deployment, analysis, and other operations. The nearly infinite configuration ability of Jenkins makes it the preferred choice of many DevOps teams.
For complex environments with many servers, Ansible would be the better tool. Its large inventory allows the user to manage the system better and more creatively. For smaller tasks which use multiple tools such as; build, code quality analysis, and testing, Jenkins would be the better tool.
To learn more about the difference between Jenkins and Ansible read our Jenkins page and Ansible page
Can Ansible Replace Terraform?
Ansible cannot replace Terraform, because they serve different purposes. Ansible is a configuration management tool, while Terraform is an orchestrator. Orchestrators keep systems in their desired state through automated computation while configuration management tools fix a problem locally. Orchestration tools tend to be better suited for a system which needs a constant and invariable state, while configuration management tools are better suited for environments that change.
What is the Difference Between Ansible And Chef?
There are several differences between Ansible and Chef, even though both are software tools used for system configuration and application deployment and both use IAC (infrastructure as code). Chef relies on a master-client architecture, with the server running on the master machine and a client running as an agent on each client machine. Ansible does not utilize agents, and has only a master running on the server side.
