Shlomi Perets
- Jul 11, 2018
- 4 min read

Industry News: Top 5 DevOps automation tools 2018: Docker vs Puppet vs Kubernetes vs Ansible vs Chef

“With our data confirming that 50% of organizations are implementing DevOps, DevOps has reached “Escape Velocity”. On the basis of this data indication, analyst firm Forrester has declared 2018 as “the year of enterprise DevOps”.

The term DevOps is used in multiple ways but in its broadest meaning, DevOps is an operational culture that aims at continuous development & integration and rapid IT service delivery by promoting better communication and improved collaboration between developers and operators. It has become an integral part of different industry sectors- all, from startups to large enterprises are leveraging DevOps tools to support their business processes – project planning until delivery.

With the increasing use of cloud computing and virtualization platforms, the need for new services has increased. The DevOps help organizations respond in a more agile manner to changing business requirements by –

Automating and monitoring the process of software creation -from integration, testing, releasing to deploying and managing it.
Reducing the development cycles.
Increasing the frequency of deployment.
Streamlining the development and release pipeline.

Thus, using agile DevOps the development and operations team can work together more efficiently and deliver applications and services at faster pace. Also, they can roll out machine level changes in the multi-server environments by using DevOps automation/configuration management tools.

IT industry is flooded with many new DevOps tools which come with vast features and this makes embracing the right DevOps platform or configuration management tool bit difficult.

Walk through this post where we have compared top 5 DevOps tools – Docker vs Kubernetes vs Puppet vs Chef vs Ansible to make things simpler for you.

What is the difference between Docker, Kubernetes, Puppet, Chef and Ansible?

Docker

Docker, is a software container technology platform that enables its users to create, deploy, run, and manage applications within the containers. Build on Linux Containers (LxC) it gives freedom to application/infrastructure developers and IT operation teams to create virtual environments and a platform for improved innovation and collaboration.

Docker’s design is modular which allows its users to build applications securely both on-premises and the cloud – it integrates well with the existing environments.

Docker containers run within the kernel of the host machine and they don’t require additional hypervisor load, so they are lightweight. Docker Engine, the client-server application, includes a daemon process (the dockerd command), a REST API to specify the interfaces that programs use to interact to the daemon, and a command line interface (CLI) client.

Docker’s client-server architecture enables the client to work with daemon – which help clients build, pull, run along with distribution of containers.

It’s standardization feature enables developers to analyze and fix bugs in the applications, as well as change Docker images, more efficiently. The users can build a single image and use it across every step during the deployment.

Chef

Chef, the configuration management tool delivers fast, scalable, and flexible automation of Web-scale IT. Chef automation tool uses ‘recipes’ for web-server configuration, databases and load balancers. The recipes, which Chef uses to automate infrastructure tasks are in the form of instructions. They help in defining the infrastructure components and how those components can be easily deployed, configured and managed.

Below diagram shows you how Chef code is developed, tested, and deployed.

Chef’s configuration policy enables users to define infrastructure as code, test configuration updates, development infrastructure and cloud instance with its development tools.

Chef, the most notable Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tool, runs the software in client-server mode (Chef-server) and ‘Chef-solo’, the standalone configuration and packages the configurations into JSON files called ‘cookbooks’.