Ansible versus Salt

Over the past few weeks, I worked with two different configuration tools: Salt and Ansible.

I started working with Salt. I quickly created a setup for a Salt server and for a Salt minion. The modules I saw looked great. However, I had consistently had trouble converting from the documentation to a practical usage. The examples provided always seemed to be CLI. Taking that and converting it to a SLS file caused me some frustration.

After creating scripts for configuring Bacula client, logcheck, and nrpe, I started doing the same on Ansible.

I found Ansible easier to work with. There were still some frustrating parts, but now I have the following roles set up:

aliases          bsdstats         joe              munin-node       ntpd             pkgng            smartd           sshd_higher_port
bacula-client    ezjail           logcheck         nrpe             openvpn          postfix          sshd             users-main

The above set of scripts allows me to configure a new jail host entirely from scripting. That said, I did have to install the OS, configure networking, add the ssh user, and configure *some* things manually. But after that, all of the above was configured by script.

I really liked the various modules and tools available in salt, but as mentioned, the examples all seemed to be CLI, but most of what I do would be with SLS, not CLI.

I will be proceeding with Ansible for setting up the rest of this server and I’ll document some of what I’m doing as I go along.

What’s installed?

Here is a minimal Ansible install:

# pkg info
ansible-1.4.1                  Simple ssh-based configuration management and orchestration system
gettext-0.18.3.1               GNU gettext package
gmp-5.1.3                      A free library for arbitrary precision arithmetic
libiconv-1.14_1                A character set conversion library
pkg-1.2.1                      New generation package manager
py27-Babel-1.3_1               Collection of tools for internationalizing Python applications
py27-Jinja2-2.7.1              Fast and easy to use stand-alone template engine
py27-MarkupSafe-0.18           Implements a XML/HTML/XHTML Markup safe string for Python
py27-keyczar-0.71c             Toolkit for safe and simple cryptography
py27-paramiko-1.11.0           Python SSH2 protocol library
py27-pycrypto-2.6.1            The Python Cryptography Toolkit
py27-pytz-2013.8,1             World Timezone Definitions for Python
py27-setuptools-1.1.7_1        Python packages installer
py27-yaml-3.10                 Python YAML parser
python-2.7_1,2                 The \"meta-port\" for the default version of Python interpreter
python2-2_1                    The \"meta-port\" for version 2 of the Python interpreter
python27-2.7.6                 Interpreted object-oriented programming language

Here is a minimal salt install:

# pkg info
gettext-0.18.3.1               GNU gettext package
gmp-5.1.3                      A free library for arbitrary precision arithmetic
libiconv-1.14_1                A character set conversion library
libzmq4-4.0.3                  ZeroMQ core library (Version 4)
pkg-1.2.1                      New generation package manager
py27-Babel-1.3_1               Collection of tools for internationalizing Python applications
py27-Jinja2-2.7.1              Fast and easy to use stand-alone template engine
py27-MarkupSafe-0.18           Implements a XML/HTML/XHTML Markup safe string for Python
py27-m2crypto-0.21.1_1         Crypto and SSL toolkit for Python
py27-msgpack-0.2.2             MessagePack (de)serializer for Python
py27-pycrypto-2.6.1            The Python Cryptography Toolkit
py27-pytz-2013.8,1             World Timezone Definitions for Python
py27-pyzmq-14.0.1              Python bindings for ZeroMQ
py27-salt-0.17.2               Distributed remote execution and configuration management system
py27-setuptools-1.1.7_1        Python packages installer
py27-yaml-3.10                 Python YAML parser
python-2.7_1,2                 The \"meta-port\" for the default version of Python interpreter
python2-2_1                    The \"meta-port\" for version 2 of the Python interpreter
python27-2.7.6                 Interpreted object-oriented programming language
sshpass-1.05                   A non-interactive ssh password auth tool

Ansible installs this, but Salt does not:

1. py27-keyczar-0.71c
2. py27-paramiko-1.11.0

Salt installs this, but Ansible does not:

1. libzmq4-4.0.3
2. py27-m2crypto-0.21.1_1
3. py27-msgpack-0.2.2
4. py27-pyzmq-14.0.1
5. sshpass-1.05