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. / Syftet med denna studie är att studera och jämföra fjärrinstallationsprogrammen Ansible, Chef ochSaltStack gällande den tid det att installera en mängd program på ett antal klienter, och derasrespektive resursutnyttjande. Resultaten från denna studie jämförs även med tidigare studier avBenson et al. (2016), som också studerat tidsåtgången för Ansible, Chef och SaltStack. Det finnsemellertid ingen tidigare forskning som nämner resursutnyttjande, vilket är lika viktigt. Studienbestår av ett experiment som utförs i ett av laboratorierna vid Högskolan i Skövde där alla treprogram konfigureras och användes för att installera en viss mängd paket till tre klientdatorervardera.Genom att mäta tiden det tar för varje program med de senaste stabila utgåvorna (2017-04-22),samt resursutnyttjandet för varje klientdator och server, kan systemadministratörer läsa dennastudie för att fatta mer informerade beslut när de bestämmer vilken applikation som ska användasför att hantera deras datorer och infrastruktur.Resultaten av studien visar att Chef är det snabbaste fjärrinstallationsprogrammet för att installerapaket på klienter. Chef visar sig också vara den mest optimerade applikationen, eftersom dessresursutnyttjande är bättre än både Ansible och SaltStack.

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer resources provided as a service over a network. OpenStack is an open-source cloud computing software. Deploying and operating OpenStack manually is a tedious process. To address this,life-cycle management tools have been developed. These tools automate the process of deploying OpenStack and can work as operations and maintenance tools. As OpenStack follows a six-month release cycle, some of the life-cycle management tools can not keep up with the releases and end up outdated due to a lack of support from the OpenStack community. This leads to older OpenStack deployments being stuck on unsupported life-cycle management tools, which could have bugs, security issues and are often more complicated to manage than newer life-cycle management tools(LCMTs). One way to solve this is by moving the OpenStack deployment from one LCMT to another, that is migration of the deployment itself. This thesis addresses the issue by identifying the current popular LCMTs through a secondary survey by OpenStack foundation and the existing migration methods through literature review. Furthermore, the effect of LCMTs on the OpenStack deployment is analysed, and controlled experiments are performed to test non-live migration between different LCMTs based OpenStack deployments. The results from the OpenStack user survey shows that, Kolla-ansible, followed by Puppet and OpenStack-ansible are the current popular LCMTs, based on their usage amongst the survey participants. The literature review combined with experimentation shows that the existing migration models are limited to the LCMT environments and the LCMTs themselves effect the OpenStack deployment in deployment file locations and through underlying technologies. We also propose an experimental method which works for migrating OpenStack from OpenStack-Ansible to Kolla-Ansible through a Manual deployment and vice-versa, which can thereby be generalized.