Example of a comparison of competing tools

                       

Overview

• Individual Vendor Organization
• Comparative trends
• Editions
• Ease of setup
• Ease of uninstall
• Server Configuration automation
• UI configuration
• Ease of Use
• Workflow Automation
• Management
• Performance speed
• Scalability of architecture
• Availability
• Interoperability
  • Examples

The subject here is about configuration management software.

But the headings and approach applies to other categories as well.

Individual Vendor Organization

Profitability

Glassdoor employee ratings

Key developers’ position among programming communities

• SaltStack is written in Python

Comparative trends

### When introduced

### Market share estimates

### Industry Analyst (Gartner) ratings

### Google search occurances

### Polls

As we all learned during the 2016 presidential election, polls can be very wrong because of biases blind-siding pollsters.

### Job posting mentions

https://www.indeed.com/jobtrends/q-puppet-q-Ansible-q-Chef-q-Saltstack-or-salt.html

### LinkedIn profile mentions

LinkedIn Search for people mentioning the product keywords in their profile.

Editions

Free unlimited trials

Ease of setup

• Dockerized
• Ansible
• Puppet
• Chef

Ansible makes use of SSH and Python, which are built into Linux operating systems.

Ease of uninstall

Transitioning from one tool to another is inevitable.

Server Configuration automation

Ansible and Salt configuration files are in YAML format - administrator oriented and thus easy to learn. Puppet DSL and Chef Ruby DSL (Domain-Specific Language) require programming skill. (steep learning curve)

Sample settings provided, with explanations

Sample user projects provided

UI configuration

Ease of Use

Screen layout

User Registration

User Login

User Password recovery

Menus

Listings

Reports/Analytics Graphs

Export

Import

Workflow Automation

Management

Performance speed

Scalability of architecture

Ansible runs with a single active node, called the primary instance. If the primary goes down, a secondary instance takes its place. Chef uses the term primary and backup server. Puppet and Salt uses the term active master in a multi-master architecture.

Ansible servers pushes configurations to all nodes, which immediately executes. Puppet clients pulls configurations from the Server. Salstack same.

Availability

Interoperability

Examples

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmRxKQHtDbY Chef vs Puppet vs Ansible vs SaltStack | Configuration Management Tools Comparison by Edureka

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2H95tx7Fuv4 Chef vs. Puppet vs. Ansible vs. Salt - What’s Best for Deploying and Managing OpenStack? (for running OpenStack) at the OpenStack Summit 2015 by OpenStack Foundation

---