Ansible in different cloud environments

Abstract: Cloud computing offers higher reliability and lower up-front IT costs than traditional computing environments and is a great way to dynamically scale both resources and capabilities. For further efficiency and consistency, cloud computing tasks can also be automated with tools such as Ansible. In this thesis, we will analyze and compare the abilities of Ansible with the three leading cloud platforms, i.e. Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). To evaluate this, we cover three different areas of automation with cloud platforms. These areas are performance, user complexity, and missing network functionalities. The performance was evaluated through experiments that revealed a big gap between the platforms, where AWS was the clear winner in all scenarios. Microsoft Azure was slightly faster than GCP when a low number of virtual machines were created but GCP scaled better than Azure when more virtual machines were created. The user complexity was evaluated on the setup process and the creation of playbooks where Azure was the clear winner in both areas. AWS and GCP had similar setup processes, but AWS takes second place through its superior documentation for the creation of playbooks. All three platforms had missing network functionalities, but the majority of the missing functionalities were not relevant as they were not related to deployment which is the main usage of an automation tool like Ansible. However, some deployment functions were missing, for example, the firewall function for AWS was missing in Ansible.