Puppet vs. Ansible: What's the Difference?

The main difference between Puppet and Ansible is that Puppet is built for complexity, scale, and long-term deployment, while many use Ansible for smaller, simpler deployments. Additionally, Puppet uses desired state automation – Ansible is built to be task-based, and can only be used declaratively with more effort. Read on and get the solution brief for more information on Puppet vs. Ansible for use cases like continuous compliance.

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Puppet vs. Ansible: Understanding Desired State & Task-Based Automation

The flexibility and free availability of task-based automation makes it a tempting option. Ansible playbooks or Puppet plans can orchestrate tasks for a wide variety of on-premises and cloud infrastructure operations.

However, maintaining desired state in heterogeneous operating systems and middleware environments with thousands of systems can quickly become tedious and complex. Operators end up expending more effort maintaining automation tools rather than system state – with no significant savings.

With Puppet, just a few lines of desired state code can do the work of tens or even hundreds of lines of playbook commands and logic. Puppet is designed to keep systems in desired state, reliably and securely, without any additional effort. That means your security teams, as well as auditors, clearly see configuration policies and how they’re enforced.

Puppet vs. Ansible For Automation

While Ansible’s task automation alone can be valuable, when it comes to enforcing continuous compliance at scale and staying audit ready, desired state automation is the way to go. Check out the Puppet vs. Ansible comparison below, and download our solution brief to learn more

  • Continuous Compliance Enforcement

    Desired State Configuration

    Task Automation

  • Continuous Compliance Enforcement

  • Continuous agent-based enforcement and verification of security and operations policies

  • Built-in self-healing infrastructure capabilities to avoid manual drift remediation and middleware configurations

  • Human readable policy as code accelerates collaboration and alignment with security teams

  • Infrastructure as code capabilities to remediate and deploy security policy updates to thousands of servers in minutes

  • Ability to quickly scan thousands of nodes to prioritize which CIS Benchmark standards to remediate

  • Continuously hardens systems using the latest CIS Benchmark standards frequently used by security teams and auditors

  • Automatically translates each declarative policy as code statement into tens or hundreds of steps in the right sequence

  • Self-service compliant builds maintain state to promote test-to-production consistency

  • Idempotent by design to eliminate complex workarounds and minimize CPU and network overhead

  • Continuous Audit Readiness

  • Human readable, agent-enforced policy as code accepted as compliance evidence by auditors

  • Ability to quickly scan thousands of nodes to prioritize which CIS Benchmark standards to remediate

  • Continuous estate-wide transparency into security and compliance posture

  • Built-in configuration reporting for fast audit preparation