Ansible VS Jenkins

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.

Jenkins is a highly extensible Java-based CI/CD automation server. It is open-source and self-hosted and enables you to automate, build, and deploy your software. The tool seamlessly integrates with various version control systems, cloud providers, and third-party applications, making it a versatile choice for modern development environments.

For instance, IDPs can automatically trigger a deployment process in Jenkins or CircleCI when a developer pushes code to a Git repository.

Familiarize yourself with tools like Jenkins, Travis CI, GitLab CI, and others that facilitate these practices.

Jenkins: An open-source automation server that can be used to set up CI/CD pipelines.

Jenkins is an open-source automation tool that allows developers to build, test and deploy software.

Choosing the right CI/CD platform and mastering YAML configuration are critical steps in optimizing your software development process. First, choose a CI/CD platform from popular options such as Jenkins, Travis CI, CircleCI, GitLab CI/CD, or GitHub Actions that meets the needs of your project and integrates seamlessly with your development stack.

Jenkins is a Java based CI/CD system that can be self hosted. In order to initiate builds, Jenkins utilizes a component called an agent to execute build commands. These agents can be a constantly running service or part of an on demand service such as a cloud provider or Docker containers. Kubernetes is one such solution to deploying build agents on demand. This article will look at how to setup Kubernetes as a provider for Jenkins build agents.

In this article, we briefly discussed some popular CI/CD platforms for React Native and why they are crucial in the programming world. We also included some honorable mentions, Jenkins CI and Bitrise, in our comparison table. It is important to remember that every project is different, and therefore it is important to evaluate each tool’s advantages and disadvantages.

Originally, I was using Jenkins (Yes, the CI pipeline java app) for this, but it was clear that is not its purpose, and it was fairly clunky. The only real upside was direct git support, but I don't mind incorporating git pulls into my jobs themselves.