Cisco

Factor Puppet Chef Ansible SaltStack Architecture Puppet masters and agents Chef server and clients Control station and remote hosts Salt master and minions Language Puppet DSL Ruby DSL YAML YAML Terminology Modules and manifests Cookbooks and recipes Playbooks and plays Pillars and grains Support for large-scale deployments Yes Yes Yes Yes Agentless Version Puppet Bolt…

Salt SSH is an agentless option provided by SaltStack that allows users to run Salt commands without having to install a minion on the remote device or node. The main requirements to use Salt SSH is that the remote system has SSH and Python enabled. Salt SSH connects to the remote system and installs a…

Puppet Bolt allows the functionality of Puppet without the need to install a Puppet master or Puppet agents on devices or nodes. Puppet Bolt connects to devices using SSH or WinRM connections. Puppet Bolt is an open source language based on the Ruby Language and can be installed as a single package. Tasks can be…

Ansible is an automation tool that is capable of automating cloud provisioning, deployment of applications, and configuration management. Ansible was created with the following concepts in mind: Consistent Secure High reliable Minimal learning curve Ansible is an agentless tool, no software or agent needs to be installed on the client machines that are being managed.…

SaltStack is configuration management tool in the same category as Chef and Puppet. SlatStack is built on Python, and has a Python interface so a user can program directly to SaltStack using Python code. Most of the instructions from SaltStack get sent out in YAML or a DSL. There are called Salt Forumlas. Formulas can…

Chef is an open source configuration management tool designed to automate configurations and operations of a network and server environment. Chef is written in Ruby and Erland. Writing code within Chef is done in Ruby. Configuration management tools function in two different types of models, push or pull. Push models push configuration from a centralised…

Puppet is a robust configuration management and automation tool. Cisco supports the use of Puppet on a variety of devices such as Catalyst Switches, Nexus Switches and the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) server platform. Puppet works with many different vendors and is one of the more common tools used for automation. Puppet can be…

EEM applets are build of multiple building blocks. EEM applets use a similar logic to if then statements used in other programming languages in the sense of ‘if an event happens this action is taken’. A couple examples of an event occurring could be if an interface changes its state, or if a specific command…

Embedded Event Manager (EEM) is a flexible and powerful Cisco IOS tool. EEM allows engineers to build applets that can automate tasks with scripts in the scripting language Tcl. Scripts can execute based on the output of an action or an event on the device. EEM is contained all within the device and does not…