Comprensión de las herramientas de DevOps: Ansible y Terraform

Ansible y Terraform: ¿ha oído hablar de estas herramientas de DevOps? Este artículo trata sobre ellos y sus diferencias.

Infraestructura como código (IaC) es una parte fundamental de la DevOps domain and is a core skill that DevOps engineers must possess. IaC is used to provision and manage the IT infrastructure using configuration code that is machine-readable definition files. Using this software engineering approach towards operations, you can automate the IT infrastructure using programming scripts.

Cuando un ingeniero de DevOps piensa en la automatización mediante código en DevOps, siempre se destacan dos herramientas de DevOps, Terraform y Ansible. Both are top-rated and widely used tools in the DevOps domain. But many folks are new to these tools and do not know the key differences between them. In this article, I will discuss Terraform, Ansibley sus principales diferencias.

¿Qué es Terraform?

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code software tool created by HashiCorp. You can orchestrate a complete IT infrastructure by using very easy-to-use declarative language in Terraform. In Terraform, you need to declare and configure the necessary resources for the infrastructure. Then, it will take care of all the required dependencies and build the infrastructure for you.

Terraform launched just a few years ago, in 2014, but the adoption rate of this tool has been fantastic. It offers excellent features that ease the IT infra’s complete orchestration because configuring the whole infrastructure in a big organization is complex. You can also integrate this tool with all popular proveedores de nube como AWS, GCP, etc.

Most IT organizations have different working environments for different teams, so development, staging, or QA and production teams will have their separate environments. After a while, it isn’t easy to manage the production environment. To ease the management, organizations use Terraform to codify everything in the production environment. By using terraform, you can spin developer and staging environments very quickly, which will be very similar to the production environment. This helps in developing and testing the application in a similar platform as production.

Many big organizations such as Starbucks, Slack, Uber, etc., leverage terraform features big time.

Estas son algunas de las ventajas de Terraform:

• Gestiona los servicios mediante una sencilla GUI.
• Describes the infrastructure for GCP, AWS, Azure, and others using a straightforward language (declarative).
• Admite el control de acceso basado en roles (RBAC) para mayor seguridad.
• It can be provisioned with OpenStack, Azure, AWS, GCP easily by using their APIs
• It follows masterless architecture, so there is no master node for tracking all the configuration updates.
• Teams within an organization can easily collaborate on the infrastructure using the terraform registry.
• Integration with continuous integration platforms like GitLab, Jenkins, Travis for deploying DevOps pipelines is easy.

¿Qué es Ansible?

Ansible is a configuration management tool in the DevOps domain that is used to automate all IT tasks. Ansible is also an open-source tool that uses both declarative and procedural languages for configuration management. This tool has outstanding support from all the popular cloud providers, and it automates the applications, networks, infrastructure, security, containers, etc. It reduces the complexities in the DevOps processes significantly, so many DevOps engineers prefer to use this tool.

automático ansibleates the most complex infrastructure with ease by using simple Ñame archivos de configuración (legible por humanos). Utiliza un archivo de código escrito en YAML para realizar la gestión de la configuración; este archivo de código se llama Manual de Ansible. Ansible is agentless and has a master that pushes all the configurations required to manage and update the applications on the remote servers.

En Ansible, debes usar SSH for connecting to the nodes in the IT infrastructure. Once the connection with the node is successful, Ansible pushes the most recent configurations using Ansible modules to install or update or remove the application. You also have options to run Comandos ad-hoc en Ansible para ejecutar pequeñas tareas con velocidad.

A continuación, se muestran algunas ventajas y características de Ansible:

• Como Ansible no tiene agentes, no es necesario instalar y ejecutar agentes en los nodos para realizar las tareas.
• Como se construyó Ansible Python, tiene una gran cantidad de bibliotecas para ofrecer en Python, y es por eso que es muy amigable para los desarrolladores.
• Proporciona autenticación segura mediante SSH.
• Ansible Tower gives enterprise-level visualization features.
• The master sends the latest configurations on the remote servers to perform changes in the infrastructure, so it supports a push-based model.
• Utiliza archivos YAML legibles por humanos para la gestión de la configuración, por lo que no se requieren habilidades de codificación adicionales.

Terraform vs. Ansible: diferencias

Orquestación frente a gestión de configuración

Ansible es un herramienta de gestión de la configuracióny Terraform es una herramienta de orquestación. Ésta es la diferencia más fundamental entre Terraform y Ansible. Aunque algunas de las características son comunes entre estas herramientas, siguen siendo diferentes entre sí.

Ansible is used to add, update, delete and manage the configuration of the IT infrastructure, whereas Terraform is used to declare infrastructure components and orchestrate them across multiple cloud providers.

Procesal vs declarativo

Terraform utiliza un lenguaje de configuración declarativo para declarar los recursos de la infraestructura de TI. Ansible utiliza lenguajes de procedimiento y declarativos para la gestión de la configuración. La forma de procedimiento se utiliza en Ansible para ejecutar comandos ad-hoc y alcanzar la configuración de infraestructura deseada. Los módulos ansible utilizan un enfoque declarativo.

Infraestructura mutable versus inmutable

puedes crearate mutable infrastructure using Ansible and immutable infrastructure using Terraform. Ansible manages and configures the software of the infrastructure on the same server. When you push more configuration updates, the production environment becomes complex and leads to many bugs that are difficult to identify and fix.

Terraform utiliza principalmente una nueva Imagen docker for any deployment on the server. Terraform creates a new docker image to update any software on the infrastructure, deploys that image on all the servers, and removes the old configuration docker image. So even after multiple configuration updates, the environment remains stable.

Maestro contra sin maestro

Ansible has a master machine architecture responsible for storing the complete infrastructure state and pushing the new configuration updates on the remote servers. That is why it is called a push-based deployment model in ansible.

In Terraform, there is no separate master system. However, when it works with cloud providers like GCP, AWS through the APIs, the API server is the master machine in that case.

Comunidad

In comparison, the community of Ansible is stronger than Terraform. For example, Ansible has 45 branches, 49.7K star, 51,836 commits, and 21K forks on GitHub, whereas Terraform has 183 branches, 28.7K star, 28,778 commits, and 6.9K forks. Currently, the community of both tools is growing rapidly.

¿Cuál elegir, Ansible o Terraform?

I would say this is not an apple to apple comparison. The answer to this question depends on the business requirements. You can use Ansible for configuration management add Terraform to orchestrate the IT infrastructure. If your organization works with cloud providers, working with Terraform would be a better option. Both the tools have their limitations and benefits, and both are popular tools in the DevOps domain. So, depending on the problem statement you are trying to solve, you can choose either of the tools.

Aquí hay una tabla de comparación que resume las diferencias entre Ansible y Terraform.

Conclusión 👩‍💻

Todo se trataba de Ansible, Terraform y sus diferencias. Ambos Herramientas devOps se utilizan mucho en entornos de producción y, a menudo, están presentes en la mayoría de las organizaciones más grandes. ¿Entonces, Qué esperas? Continúe y elija la herramienta que sea más adecuada para los requisitos comerciales de su organización. Puede comenzar aprendiendo cualquiera de las herramientas, pero conocer ambas le brinda una ventaja en la diversa industria.

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