A comparison of resource utilization and deployment time for open-source software deployment tools

Abstract: The purpose of this study is to compare the software deployment tools Ansible, Chef and SaltStackregarding deployment time and their respective resource utilization, and the findings of this studyare also compared to the previous works of Benson et al. (2016), which also studied deploymenttime. However, there is no previous research which mentions resource utilization, which is equallyimportant. The study consists of an experiment performed in one of the laboratory rooms at theUniversity of Skövde where all three software deployment tools are configured to deploy a setamount of packages to three hosts each.By measuring deployment time with the most stable releases (as of 2017-04-22) for each softwaredeployment tool, as well as resource utilization for each host and server, this study may assist systemadministrators to make more informed decisions when deciding which application to use to managetheir computers and infrastructure.The results of the study show that Chef is the fastest software deployment tool in terms ofdeployment time. Chef is also shown to be the most optimized application, as its usage of resourcesis better than both Ansible and SaltStack.