Automated Network Configuration : A Comparison Between Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack for Network Configuration

Sammanfattning

Automating the configuration of network devices contributes to faster configuration and helps increase consistency compared with manual configuration. In this thesis, we compare the automation tools Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack and evaluate their performance when configuring network devices. To evaluate the automation tools this thesis consists of a comprehensive overview and a set of performance experiments. The comprehensive overview focuses on comparing the automation tools and their capabilities whilst the set of performance experiments focuses on comparing the performance of the automation tools. The comprehensive overview reveals that all automation tools we investigate can achieve automated network configuration. However, the approach to configure network devices varies between the automation tools. For the configuration of network devices Ansible is more capable than Puppet and SaltStack. The lack of documentation and support for Puppet and SaltStack leads to an increase in usage complexity. The performance experiments reveal that Ansible and SaltStack have a better performance than Puppet for a lower number of configuration changes. However, with an increasing number of configuration changes, Ansible shows a noticeable difference whilst Puppet and SaltStack do not.