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Chef, Puppet and Ansible

By now, you have an understanding of Azure Automation. In this step, we’ll look at a brief overview of the automation resources that are available in the marketplace.

The first set of tools to introduce DevOps at scale was Chef and Puppet. Microsoft Azure supports automation resources such as Chef and Puppet through virtual machine extensions. Chef and Puppet resources can be downloaded on the Azure Marketplace.

Chef

Chef helps you to manage your infrastructure in the cloud, on-premises, or in a hybrid environment by treating the IaC using instructions, or recipes, to configure nodes.

Puppet

Puppet provides you with the enterprise tools that you need to automate an entire lifecycle on your Azure infrastructure and to provide consistency and transparency into infrastructure changes.

NOTE: Although both offer similar solutions, choose the right tool for your organisation’s needs by understanding the different approaches each takes for managing configurations. InfoWorld has an in-depth analysis of the differences between the two that might impact your decision to adopt one or the other: Puppet or Chef: The Configuration Management Dilemma.

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source platform that automates configuration management, app deployment, and orchestration. Ansible is designed for multitier deployments and, unlike Puppet or Chef, is agent-less, so you don’t have to install software on the managed machines.

To manage Linux machines, Ansible uses Secure Shell (SSH). For Windows machines, Ansible uses remote PowerShell. Ansible uses modules to interact with the Microsoft Azure portal.