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.

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.