Best 8 Ansible Alternatives in 2021

Ansible is a DevOps tool which automates software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment. It is used to set up and manage infrastructure and applications.

Here, is a curated list of top 8 tools that can easily replace Ansible. This list includes commercial as well as open-source tools with popular features and latest download link.

1) JetBrains Space

Space is a unified exstensible team collaboration solution that covers software development, project and team management, and communications.

Features:

Software development tools:

• Source control hosting (Git).
• Code review, including merge requests and quality gates.
• Automation CI/CD.
• Package and container registries.
• An IntelliJ-based IDE plugin.
• Project management tools: checklists for planning, issue track, and issue boards.

Organizational and communication tools:

• A team directory for managing the company's structure.
• Management of vacations, absences, and locations.
• Chats, сollaborative documents, and blogs.
• Meeting management, calendars, and To-Do lists.
• Space is available in the cloud with the Free plan for unlimited users.

2) Rudder

Rudder is a DevOps solution for continuous configuration and auditing. It is easy to use web-driven solution for IT automation.

Key Features:

• Workflow offers various user options like non-expert users, expert users, and managers
• Automate common system administration tasks such as installation and configuration
• Enforce configuration over time
• Provide Inventory of all managed nodes
• Web interface for configuring and managing nodes
• Compliance reporting by configuration or by node

Download link: https://www.rudder-project.org/site/get-rudder/downloads/

3) SaltStack

SaltStack is configuration management and orchestration tool. It enables system administrators to automate server provisioning and management tasks.

Features:

• It offers a simple programming interface
• Prebuilt modules to support 100s of applications
• Powerful API interacts easily with other systems
• SaltStack is designed to handle ten thousand minions per master

Download link: https://www.saltstack.com/

4) Puppet Enterprise

Puppet enterprise tool eliminates manual work for software delivery process. It helps developer to deliver great software rapidly

Features:

• Puppet enterprise tool eliminates manual work for software delivery process. It helps developer to deliver great software rapidly
• Model and manage your entire environment
• Intelligent orchestration and visual workflows
• Real-time context-aware reporting
• Define and continually enforce infrastructure
• It inspects and reports on packages running across infrastructure
• Desired state conflict detection and remediation

Download link: https://puppet.com/try-puppet/puppet-enterprise/

5) Chef

Chef is a useful DevOps tool for achieving speed, scale, and consistency. It is a Cloud based system. It can be used to ease out complex tasks and perform automation.

Features:

• Accelerate cloud adoption
• Effectively manage data centers
• It can manage multiple cloud environments
• It maintains high availability

Download link: https://downloads.chef.io/

6) CFEngine

CFEngine is a DevOps tool for IT automation. It is an ideal tool for configuration management. It helps teams to automate large-scale complex infrastructure.

Key Features:

• Provides rapid solution with the execution time less than one second
• An open source configuration solution with an unmatched security record
• It conducted billions of compliance checks in large-scale production environments
• It allows deploying a model-based configuration change across 50,000 servers in very few minutes

Download link: https://cfengine.com/product/free-download/

7) Gitlab CI

GitLab CI is a part of GitLab. It is a web application with an API that stores its state in a database. It manages projects and provides a friendly user interface, besides offering the advantage of all the features of GitLab.

Features:

• GitLab Container Registry is a secure registry for Docker images
• GitLab offers a convenient way to change metadata of an issue or merge request without adding slash commands in the comment field
• It provides APIs for most features, so it allows developers to create deeper integrations with the product
• Helps developers to put their idea into production by finding areas of improvement in their development process
• It helps you to keep your information secure with Confidential Issues
• Internal projects in GitLab allow promoting inner sourcing of internal repositories.

Download link: https://about.gitlab.com/installation/

8) Jenkins

Jenkins is an open-source continuous integration tool. It is written using the Java programming language. It facilitates real-time testing and reporting on isolated changes in a larger code base. This software helps developers to quickly find and solve defects in their code base & automate testing of their builds.

Features:

• Provide support to scale out to a large number of nodes and distribute the workload equally among them
• Easily updated with all OS and versions of Linux, Mac OS or Windows
• It offers easy installation as Jenkins comes as a WAR file all you need to drop into your JEE container and your setup up ready to run.
• Jenkins can be easily set up and configured with the help of its web interface
• It's can easily distribute work across several machines,

Download link: https://www.jenkins.io/download/

9) Codenvy

Codenvy automates applications or micro services to any number of servers. It fully automates deployments of text and binary files from any number of target servers.

Features:

• It allows managing environment-specific configuration parameters for your application
• It allows generating command-line installers to be used for deployments on any environment
• This software development tool eliminates the need for installation & configuration.
• It takes out many operational risks in the software development process
• The friendly web interface lets configure deployments efficiently and painlessly
• It supports a broad range operating systems including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc.

Download link: https://codenvy.com/

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