Maybe this is a stupid question, but I've been working with Ansible, and I just came across CoreOS Fleet. I could be wrong, but Fleet seems to do almost the exact same in terms of just being another tool to provision/run commands on multiple servers, and is native to CoreOS. CoreOS has it's cloud-config user-data file and Ansible has playbooks. Ansible is obviously different in that it is a tool to execute over SSH, but there seems to be a lot of overlap. I'm new to both of them and feel there must be something big I am missing that Fleet offers over Ansible. Do they have a different purpose, and if so what is the big difference?
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CoreOS is a Linux distribution specializing in running containers, fleet and etcd provide cluster services on top of that. Ansible deploys a defined state to remote hosts, mostly Linux but also a little Unix and Windows.
Ansible doesn't provide services itself or require an agent on the host. etcd provides shared state and fleet an init system, with multiple nodes.
They can complement each other if you deploy and maintain CoreOS nodes with Ansible. Or they can compete if you deploy with Ansible at the (virtual) machine level and not containers. Or use something else entirely, there are many ways to deploy things.
John Mahowald
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How is that supposed to answer the question about Fleet? You don't even mention it. – techraf Aug 14 '16 at 00:58
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Imprecise language about projects related to CoreOS, made an edit. The overall comparison still stands: Ansible configures whatever you have remotely with ssh, while CoreOS is a Linux container distribution. – John Mahowald Aug 15 '16 at 01:32