cloudinit VS Fabric

Compare cloudinit vs Fabric and see what are their differences.

cloudinit

Official upstream for the cloud-init: cloud instance initialization (by canonical)

Fabric

Simple, Pythonic remote execution and deployment. (by fabric)
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cloudinit Fabric
31 4
3,097 15,000
1.6% 0.2%
9.7 6.1
6 days ago 11 months ago
Python Python
GNU General Public License v3.0 or later BSD 2-clause "Simplified" License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

cloudinit

Posts with mentions or reviews of cloudinit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-08-08.
  • Tell HN: Ubuntu 24.04 force enables password auth, need to disable differently
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 14 Nov 2024
    This comes from the `ssh_pwauth` setting in cloud-init. Docs: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/reference/modules...

    The PR https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/1618 implemented using a "sshd_config.d" file.

  • Setting Up The Home Lab: Setting up Kubernetes Using Ansible
    5 projects | dev.to | 8 Aug 2024
    In my previous article I went over how to set up VMs in Proxmox VE using Terraform to deploy the VMs and Cloud-Init to provision them. In this article I'll discuss using Ansible playbooks to do further provisioning of VMs.
  • Setting Up The Home Lab: Terraform and Cloud-Init
    2 projects | dev.to | 31 Jul 2024
    In my last article I talked about getting Terraform set up on Proxmox VE. In this article I want to talk about how I got Cloud-Init set up to use with my Terraform templates.
  • Multipass + Cloud-Init
    1 project | dev.to | 22 Jul 2024
    Multipass is a mini-cloud on your workstation using native hypervisors of all the supported plaforms (Windows, macOS and Linux). Multipass can launch and run virtual machines and configure them with cloud-init like a public cloud.
  • Setting up the home lab: Terraform
    2 projects | dev.to | 17 Jul 2024
    And there you have it! In my next article I'll show you how to provision your VMs using Cloud-Init
  • Industry Standard for Cloud Instance Initialization: Cloud-Init
    2 projects | dev.to | 6 Jun 2024
    [1] Cloud-Init: https://github.com/canonical/Cloud-Init [2] AutoMQ: https://github.com/AutoMQ/automq [3] Introduction to Cloud-Init: https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/explanation/introduction.html#how-does-Cloud-Init-work
  • Custom RAM boot PXE Linux
    5 projects | /r/linux | 6 Dec 2023
    Newer versions of OS use cloud init -> https://cloud-init.io/
  • The Reluctant Sysadmin's Guide to Securing a Linux Server
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Jul 2023
    Overall, I think in an article that focuses on cloud computing (specifically AWS) there's too much time being spent in the local command line of a server.

    It's an especially revealing sentence when the authors says that "Most attacks won’t be against what we’ve covered in this guide, but against the applications you install next. Properly done, containers can limit the impact."

    If we are running containerized applications and we are already in the cloud, why are we futzing around on the command line of a Linux box? Why are we not using a cload orchestrator that abstracts the OS from the equation entirely?

    If we do have a need to be on a bare Linux box, all of this OS configuration is better handled with cloud init [1], a configuration management tool like Ansible, and/or by building an image with Packer.

    I know that seems like overkill for a small hobby reluctant sysadmin project type of deal but it's very little extra effort once you get used to the workflow. I would even recommend putting this infrastructure in Terraform even though, again, it seems like overkill at first.

    Someone else in the comments mentioned that it's easier to just start with a hardened image from the AWS Marketplace, and I also agree with that idea. Find a free hardened image and make that the base for your system.

    [1] https://cloud-init.io

  • Is the linux community done circlejerking for Red Hat or are we just going to forget about recent news in a week?
    1 project | /r/linux | 28 Jun 2023
  • nmtui changes don't survive reboot?
    1 project | /r/redhat | 24 May 2023
    Found this related article: "cloud-init re-generates network config every reboot overwriting manual admin changes on CentOS." https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/issues/2983

Fabric

Posts with mentions or reviews of Fabric. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-10-30.
  • What scripts have you built to stand up a new server?
    8 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Oct 2024
    Thanks, will take a look at that curl thing. We are still using this and been working for us for ~15 years (python 2, ported to python 3) and this is just an example of how to take https://fabfile.org to the extreme but still is not the best way to do it. We only ~50 servers so it is not a massive fleet. The convenience of typing `fab ` to do things under control is still better than nothing :)
  • Ansible clone how to
    3 projects | /r/ansible | 30 May 2022
    Otherwise, in addition to ansible-core, there's other config management projects written in python like salt or fabric that you could perhaps draw inspiration from.
  • Good tool for automatic setup and deployment of Django projects
    2 projects | /r/codehunter | 13 Apr 2022
    I've used Rake and Fabric for somewhat similar (but less ambitious) stuff in the past and I'm thinking that Fabric might be a pretty good fit for this task as well, but I'd still like your input. Are there other tools I should look into? I've heard goodthings about Puppet but just looking at their site (it contains the word Enterprise ) gives me the feeling that it might be overkill for a one man operation.
  • Cronjob to run on multiple multiple mchines
    3 projects | /r/bash | 12 Mar 2021
    Fabric, if you like Python.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing cloudinit and Fabric you can also consider the following projects:

Ansible - Ansible is a radically simple IT automation platform that makes your applications and systems easier to deploy and maintain. Automate everything from code deployment to network configuration to cloud management, in a language that approaches plain English, using SSH, with no agents to install on remote systems. https://docs.ansible.com.

pyinfra - pyinfra turns Python code into shell commands and runs them on your servers. Execute ad-hoc commands and write declarative operations. Target SSH servers, local machine and Docker containers. Fast and scales from one server to thousands.

Cloud-Init - unofficial mirror of Ubuntu's cloud-init

letsencrypt - Certbot is EFF's tool to obtain certs from Let's Encrypt and (optionally) auto-enable HTTPS on your server. It can also act as a client for any other CA that uses the ACME protocol.

pexpect - A Python module for controlling interactive programs in a pseudo-terminal

honcho - Honcho: a python clone of Foreman. For managing Procfile-based applications.

psutil - Cross-platform lib for process and system monitoring in Python

netboot.xyz - Your favorite operating systems in one place. A network-based bootable operating system installer based on iPXE.

pypyr automation task runner - pypyr task-runner cli & api for automation pipelines. Automate anything by combining commands, different scripts in different languages & applications into one pipeline process.

Fabtools - Tools for writing awesome Fabric files

ShutIt - Automation framework for programmers

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