Ansible vs Docker vs Kubernetes

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Ansible

18.8K
15.2K
+ 1
1.3K
Docker

170.3K
136.9K
+ 1
3.9K
Kubernetes

58.7K
50.7K
+ 1
677
Advice on Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes
Eddy Kapelczak [PHARMDs]
Pharmacist | CEO | Student at Prescripz TeleHealth · | 9 upvotes · 15.4K views
Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsible
and
DockerDocker

I am looking for an easy to use platform or VPS hosting service that will allow me to deploy additional VPS at will and quickly install the OS as well.

I am also looking for a backend software that allows team messaging (chat service, video, and audio) that can be self-hosted and is free. Also, an easy to use webRTC library would be great too!

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Replies (6)

I would recommend DigitalOcean for quick VPS creation. But it worth to consider Kubernetes or at least Docker. Once I did a project with DigitalOcean. They were guarantee kind of 90 seconds for creation of new VPS from a predefined template. But if you will decide to use Kubernetes (you can use DigitalOcean for that too, or other clouds, like Google, Azure, Amazon) - the deployment would be even much quicker than 90 seconds.

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Anibal Ardid
Recommends
on
PleskPlesk

Do you referred about hosting or about tool/software to use in it ? About soft managing vps/dedicated server ... I tried manual lamp installation, cyperpanel, cpanel, plesk, webmin, etc.

Now, in my opinion, plesk offers the best solution.

I installed on Arsys web hosting (cloud vps) as free, and I pay official plesk support ($10/month). I could create domains, different accounts, etc.

I do that via cli (command line , bash commands), but you could do via web .

If you have any doubt askme ;)

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Recommends
on
Amazon EC2Amazon EC2

Use Amazon EC2 for your infrastructure (including the OS, Networking, Storage, Compute, etc.). Create an AWS account for free here.

Use Ansible to configure your Operating Systems, deploy software, and manage the configurations on your servers in AWS. Puppet and Chef are other options too, but those require an agent run on your servers. Ansible just requires an SSH connection to your servers and you push out playbook runs across your servers whenever you need. It's idempotent so it only pushes changes that it determines are new to the remote systems.

I think Slack has a free version you can use if you want. That's what I've always used for Business chat.

Use Docker for you applications. You never have to manage dependencies on your servers when you deploy your applications using docker containers. You might have to manage things like versions of python and other OS centric software libraries, but nothing that would be a specific dependency for your applications. Everything is built into the container.

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Sharath Vutpala
Site Reliability Engineer at Axelerant · | 3 upvotes · 8.5K views

I would suggest using Terraform to maintain your infrastructure as code. You can easily manage the underlying Virtual machines with the help of Terraform. I would also suggest to leverage the benefits of cloud computing by using something like AWS EC2 for as your VPS. I will also suggest RocketChat for your team communication. You can simply set this up using Docker. I am attaching the link on how to set-up Rocketchat with the help of Docker.

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Juan Ignacio Borda
Technical Leader at Flux IT · | 1 upvotes · 7K views

you can achive all that using AWS EC2 instances (virtual machines) For chat and messaging We use mattermost (which you can install even with docker AWS fargate)

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Recommends
on
RocketChatRocketChat

Hello

I would recommend rocketchat for team messaging, video, files sharing etc.... It's awesome and self hosted.

We've been using it for 5 years and no worries

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Needs advice
on
AnsibleAnsibleChefChef
and
Puppet LabsPuppet Labs

I'm just getting started using Vagrant to help automate setting up local VMs to set up a Kubernetes cluster (development and experimentation only). (Yes, I do know about minikube)

I'm looking for a tool to help install software packages, setup users, etc..., on these VMs. I'm also fairly new to Ansible, Chef, and Puppet. What's a good one to start with to learn? I might decide to try all 3 at some point for my own curiosity.

The most important factors for me are simplicity, ease of use, shortest learning curve.

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Replies (2)
Recommends
on
AnsibleAnsible

I have been working with Puppet and Ansible. The reason why I prefer ansible is the distribution of it. Ansible is more lightweight and therefore more popular. This leads to situations, where you can get fully packaged applications for ansible (e.g. confluent) supported by the vendor, but only incomplete packages for Puppet.

The only advantage I would see with Puppet if someone wants to use Foreman. This is still better supported with Puppet.

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Gabriel Pa
Recommends
on
KubernetesKubernetes
at

If you are just starting out, might as well learn Kubernetes There's a lot of tools that come with Kube that make it easier to use and most importantly: you become cloud-agnostic. We use Ansible because it's a lot simpler than Chef or Puppet and if you use Docker Compose for your deployments you can re-use them with Kubernetes later when you migrate

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Decisions about Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes
Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 30 upvotes · 8.9M views

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

  • GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
  • Respectively Git as revision control system
  • SourceTree as Git GUI
  • Visual Studio Code as IDE
  • CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
  • Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
  • SonarQube as quality gate
  • Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
  • VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
  • Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
  • Heroku for deploying in test environments
  • nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
  • SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
  • Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
  • PostgreSQL as preferred database system
  • Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

  • Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
  • Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
  • Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
  • Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
  • Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
  • Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.
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Florian Sager
IT DevOp at Agitos GmbH · | 3 upvotes · 417.7K views
Chose
LXDLXD
over
DockerDocker

lxd/lxc and Docker aren't congruent so this comparison needs a more detailed look; but in short I can say: the lxd-integrated administration of storage including zfs with its snapshot capabilities as well as the system container (multi-process) approach of lxc vs. the limited single-process container approach of Docker is the main reason I chose lxd over Docker.

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Pros of Ansible
Pros of Docker
Pros of Kubernetes
  • 284
    Agentless
  • 210
    Great configuration
  • 199
    Simple
  • 176
    Powerful
  • 155
    Easy to learn
  • 69
    Flexible
  • 55
    Doesn't get in the way of getting s--- done
  • 35
    Makes sense
  • 30
    Super efficient and flexible
  • 27
    Powerful
  • 11
    Dynamic Inventory
  • 9
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 7
    Works with AWS
  • 6
    Cloud Oriented
  • 6
    Easy to maintain
  • 4
    Vagrant provisioner
  • 4
    Simple and powerful
  • 4
    Multi language
  • 4
    Simple
  • 4
    Because SSH
  • 4
    Procedural or declarative, or both
  • 4
    Easy
  • 3
    Consistency
  • 2
    Well-documented
  • 2
    Masterless
  • 2
    Debugging is simple
  • 2
    Merge hash to get final configuration similar to hiera
  • 2
    Fast as hell
  • 1
    Manage any OS
  • 1
    Work on windows, but difficult to manage
  • 1
    Certified Content
  • 823
    Rapid integration and build up
  • 691
    Isolation
  • 521
    Open source
  • 505
    Testa­bil­i­ty and re­pro­ducibil­i­ty
  • 460
    Lightweight
  • 218
    Standardization
  • 185
    Scalable
  • 106
    Upgrading / down­grad­ing / ap­pli­ca­tion versions
  • 88
    Security
  • 85
    Private paas environments
  • 34
    Portability
  • 26
    Limit resource usage
  • 17
    Game changer
  • 16
    I love the way docker has changed virtualization
  • 14
    Fast
  • 12
    Concurrency
  • 8
    Docker's Compose tools
  • 6
    Easy setup
  • 6
    Fast and Portable
  • 5
    Because its fun
  • 4
    Makes shipping to production very simple
  • 3
    Highly useful
  • 3
    It's dope
  • 2
    Very easy to setup integrate and build
  • 2
    HIgh Throughput
  • 2
    Package the environment with the application
  • 2
    Does a nice job hogging memory
  • 2
    Open source and highly configurable
  • 2
    Simplicity, isolation, resource effective
  • 2
    MacOS support FAKE
  • 2
    Its cool
  • 2
    Docker hub for the FTW
  • 2
    Super
  • 0
    Asdfd
  • 164
    Leading docker container management solution
  • 128
    Simple and powerful
  • 106
    Open source
  • 76
    Backed by google
  • 58
    The right abstractions
  • 25
    Scale services
  • 20
    Replication controller
  • 11
    Permission managment
  • 9
    Supports autoscaling
  • 8
    Cheap
  • 8
    Simple
  • 6
    Self-healing
  • 5
    No cloud platform lock-in
  • 5
    Promotes modern/good infrascture practice
  • 5
    Open, powerful, stable
  • 5
    Reliable
  • 4
    Scalable
  • 4
    Quick cloud setup
  • 3
    Cloud Agnostic
  • 3
    Captain of Container Ship
  • 3
    A self healing environment with rich metadata
  • 3
    Runs on azure
  • 3
    Backed by Red Hat
  • 3
    Custom and extensibility
  • 2
    Sfg
  • 2
    Gke
  • 2
    Everything of CaaS
  • 2
    Golang
  • 2
    Easy setup
  • 2
    Expandable

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Cons of Ansible
Cons of Docker
Cons of Kubernetes
  • 8
    Dangerous
  • 5
    Hard to install
  • 3
    Doesn't Run on Windows
  • 3
    Bloated
  • 3
    Backward compatibility
  • 2
    No immutable infrastructure
  • 8
    New versions == broken features
  • 6
    Unreliable networking
  • 6
    Documentation not always in sync
  • 4
    Moves quickly
  • 3
    Not Secure
  • 16
    Steep learning curve
  • 15
    Poor workflow for development
  • 8
    Orchestrates only infrastructure
  • 4
    High resource requirements for on-prem clusters
  • 2
    Too heavy for simple systems
  • 1
    Additional vendor lock-in (Docker)
  • 1
    More moving parts to secure
  • 1
    Additional Technology Overhead

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What is Ansible?

Ansible is an IT automation tool. It can configure systems, deploy software, and orchestrate more advanced IT tasks such as continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates. Ansible’s goals are foremost those of simplicity and maximum ease of use.

What is Docker?

The Docker Platform is the industry-leading container platform for continuous, high-velocity innovation, enabling organizations to seamlessly build and share any application — from legacy to what comes next — and securely run them anywhere

What is Kubernetes?

Kubernetes is an open source orchestration system for Docker containers. It handles scheduling onto nodes in a compute cluster and actively manages workloads to ensure that their state matches the users declared intentions.

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Blog Posts

Kubernetesetcd+2
2
1163
Dec 8 2020 at 5:50PM

DigitalOcean

GitHubMySQLPostgreSQL+11
2
2361
PythonDockerKubernetes+7
3
1104
May 21 2020 at 12:02AM

Rancher Labs

KubernetesAmazon EC2Grafana+12
5
1498
Apr 16 2020 at 5:34AM

Rancher Labs

KubernetesRancher+2
2
942
What are some alternatives to Ansible, Docker, and Kubernetes?
Puppet Labs
Puppet is an automated administrative engine for your Linux, Unix, and Windows systems and performs administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating server configurations) based on a centralized specification.
Chef
Chef enables you to manage and scale cloud infrastructure with no downtime or interruptions. Freely move applications and configurations from one cloud to another. Chef is integrated with all major cloud providers including Amazon EC2, VMWare, IBM Smartcloud, Rackspace, OpenStack, Windows Azure, HP Cloud, Google Compute Engine, Joyent Cloud and others.
Salt
Salt is a new approach to infrastructure management. Easy enough to get running in minutes, scalable enough to manage tens of thousands of servers, and fast enough to communicate with them in seconds. Salt delivers a dynamic communication bus for infrastructures that can be used for orchestration, remote execution, configuration management and much more.
Terraform
With Terraform, you describe your complete infrastructure as code, even as it spans multiple service providers. Your servers may come from AWS, your DNS may come from CloudFlare, and your database may come from Heroku. Terraform will build all these resources across all these providers in parallel.
Jenkins
In a nutshell Jenkins CI is the leading open-source continuous integration server. Built with Java, it provides over 300 plugins to support building and testing virtually any project.
See all alternatives