Difference Between Ansible and Kubernetes

Electronic media has made it possible for us to automate almost all processes in our lives. When technology has such a profound impact on customer’s lives. It most definitely will have an impact on the functions and operations of the business.

There are thousands of tools out there that help organizations in managing their operations. These tools and their support is a business industry in itself and a prosperous one at that.

But we are not here to talk about that now are we? and
We need to discuss what is the difference between Ansible and Kubernetes?
However, before we do, you should know what these two actually are?

What is Ansible?Ansible is a configuration management tool. It provides the application of deployment, installation and configuration of the server. You write a configuration file for those and run it to deploy, install and configure things on servers. Using the tool, you don't have to run the installation and configuration programs to the servers one-by-one. The tool just manages to automate installation and configuration to all the servers.

Ansible is something you would use if you had a number of hosts and you wanted them to be configuration driven. For instance, if you had a dozen types of servers with different roles, and you wanted each host within a specific role to be identical. Maybe all hosts would all have the same kernel patch, but different packages based on the role.

A configuration management tool lets you specify rules by which you manage your servers, and makes large scale management simple and consistent. It has many features around pushing software and changes out to hosts, examples would be making sure packages are installed and doing diffs on files it wants to modify before it applies changes.

What is Kubernetes?
Kubernetes is an orchestration tool for Docker containers. It manages deployment as well as maintenance of the deployed docker cluster to work as defined, including maintaining a number of containers, accessibility, and logging.

In practical terms, you use the two tools for very different things. Put simply Ansible pushes changes out to hosts while Kubernetes keeps your Docker containers up and running.

Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a Docker runtime management system. It presumes that you have Docker images already built that you want to run. Kubernetes handles the scheduling, execution, and management of the containers. Kubernetes has extensive features around making sure your code stays running and available in a cluster of nodes. It will find a node to schedule your process on, keep a number of copies running so that your service stays available and then route traffic to your processes. It can scale service with more processes to handle changes in traffic automatically. A critical feature is service discovery, which tells clients which hosts are running the services.

This is actually a very difficult problem because as your processes and hosts scale, die, or move around very quickly, clients need timely information about which server to use. Kubernetes health checks your service and restarts or reschedules it if a process is unavailable while also fixing the routing information for clients.

The difference between Ansible and Kubernetes.
This is an apples and oranges comparison. Ansible like Chef is designed to make standing up virtual machines easier by creating playbooks or recipes that get applied when you run it on the specific host. Kubernetes is a container orchestration engine. It takes docker containers organized and schedules them onto worker nodes. You can, of course, use Chef/Ansible in conjunction with Kubernetes. In fact, Chef/Ansible makes standing up new worker nodes in Kubernetes a lot easier.

Each tool has its own very different use. You are more likely to use Ansible to set up hosts that will run Kubernetes than to use Ansible in place of Kubernetes. But we promised you differentiation in the beginning and so differentiate we shall. Here is the differentiation between the two tools on the bases of universal criteria for any given tool.

OperationsWhen it comes to operations. Both tools are very adequate in their respective functions. Ansible is an Agentless operation. Meaning you will not be playing proxy for anyone and work on it directly. Whereas when Kubernetes is a concerned top docker may require management solutions for optimal output.

Settings options
Ansible can easily be configured. It is not very difficult to mould and tailor its settings to be more suited to your needs. Whereas Kubernetes is a simple enough tool as well. However, it does not mean it lacks any less power in its functionality. It is open-source software that is powered by Google. So it is a very technically sound tool.

Learning
Ansible is fairly easy to learn. As with most of the tools the learning is only improved by practical application and implementation. When it comes to Kubernetes, the learning is not that simple and the learning curve can be steep. In any case, there are many resources on the internet that can help you incredibly in learning either tool. The online community is great and forums help fill in the blanks where the support might not.

Interface
Ansible has an incredible interface. It has a backward capacity that makes it very efficient and convenient.No disrespect to Kubernetes , has an incredible interface as well but a poor workflow for development kind of ruins the entire thing for the tool.
It is not as if the Ansible picture is perfect in that case. It cannot run on windows and can be very hard to install on any other platform.

In the endAt the end of the day, both the tools have their advantages and disadvantages. You need to understand that this comparison is just for understanding the difference between the two and in no way is a parameter for deciding which tool is better. What this means is that both the tools have different functionalities and should not be compared. They have their own uses and can not be a direct substitute for one another. The comparison of the two is to make you understand how the two tools operate and what their capabilities are. With that said