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Will Ansible Push Chef and Puppet Out of the Configuration Management Market?

Ansible from RedHat has steadily gained market share since its introduction and has now surpassed its two main rivals. Will Ansible push Chef and Puppet out of the open-source configuration management tool market?

From a feature and cost perspective, all three products are relatively comparable, but Ansible has the edge when it comes to ease of use, and that may be a big part of why its adoption has grown so quickly.

It is important to note that the ongoing and rapid evolution of DevOps practices will no doubt mean that individual tools will come and go over time (much like programming languages which have, for decades, suffered from flavor-of-the-month-syndrome). It’s not inconceivable that all three tools will have fallen by the wayside in a few years as:

• DevOps practice matures and evolves
• competitors and new comers introduce novel capabilities
• vendor acquisitions play out in this space

The early adopters of Configuration Management tools will reap great rewards for their courage; however, they are also most likely to be stung by the to-and-fro of toolset popularity.

Our Take

DevOps practices will increasingly become the norm for cloud-based applications; expect a frothy market when it comes to tool sets, many of which will rise and then fall in popularity in this fast-evolving space. Select your tools carefully but also be prepared to migrate at strategic points, when some of today’s popular choices fall out of fashion.

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