Keep it simple

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Honestly, fuck Ansible.

It's the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.

It's YAML is awful, it scales terribly, it's so fucking slow at literally everything, it gives people who have no clue what they're doing a false sense of confidence.

The number of times I've seen app teams waste the time of support groups and engineers because something went wrong and they didn't have the knowledge to know why and need to waste so many man hours having other people solve it for them. I (the engineer) was added to a chat that had 15 people in it because they, after running ansible, saw errors in their server... So clearly there was a problem with the server... At no point did they question there Ansible job.

Of the various tools I've used, I prefer Salt. The YAML is slightly less ass and it's so much faster while also seeming to scaling better too. It by no means is perfect.

Lemminary

Thanks for including an alternative you'd recommend!

Lemminary

AHK grammar is a fucking mess, honestly.

mosiacmango

Ahh, I didn't realize we had mixed some "git gud" dark souls shit into my devops.

But seriously, I'll give your guide a look. Everyone should taste madness occasionally.

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Well you will be happy to hear that it's owned by Broadcom now. While salt is better, I wouldn't use it just because of Broadcom.

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I also appreciate the alternative suggestion. No terraform love?

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I seem to remember having the same trouble, maybe with hiding vars from logs?

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Ow! My semver.

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THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I'M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!

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I mean... You liked dark souls, right?

Once nix clicks, you'll know the massive missed potential that ansible is (being just another abstraction layer, and not baked into the package manager itself) and you'll never look at ansible the same way again.

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This is the argument I use to convince straight guys to let me bum them

Just so you know.

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IBM owns Red Hat.

mosiacmango

Sure, but that doesnt mean I want to mix its difficulty into code.

I like fried chicken too, but i don't try someone add json to the experience of eating it.

Good things dont all have to be sluiced together into a juicy pulp. They can be good all on their lonesome.

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Terraform and Ansible do different things, they do have overlapping features, but ultimately they're Kent to do different things. I use them both at my current job with Terraform running Ansible

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No. Because the python version of the host and the target server must loosely match up. Otherwise you get some cryptic error messages in some unexpected modules.
Red Hat's solution: just manage RHEL 9 targets from RHEL9 hosts and RHEL8 from RHEL8 hosts. There is no official way to align python versions across that major.

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Except it isn't actually YAML you're writing, it's a jinja2 string template that parses to YAML because the expressions they came up with ended up not being sufficient.

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Yeah, reading XML without rendering it or at least with syntax highlighting is a pain.

JSON is way nicer.

slazer2au

uses vanilla ssh

Clearly you haven't tried automation of network devices because it constantly bitches about missing ansible-pylibssh and falls back to Paramiko

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Honestly, fuck Ansible.

It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.

It's actually on par with 20-year-old tech. There's nothing it's doing that we weren't doing back then already in the enterprise space. And, in so many cases where Ansible's unable to respond well to changes to the system, it ends up not being on par with 20-yer-old tech.

Salt is better as it's one generation newer, aka last-gen. Puppet, salt, chef/cinc, all the same generation, and we get single source of truth and fast operation de

Current-gen is mgmtconfig, and from it we get instant/constant converging event-driven code. If you like ansible, you're gonna love sale or cinc. If you love salt or puppet, mgmtconfig will blow your mind clean out the back of your head.

100 servers? 5000? Ansible don't care

Sub-second convergence of thousands of servers. Files managed so hard you can't manually mod them as they revert immediately and it's an actual race to try and mod a file to use it, since it's hooked into inotify and friends.

James even put in a YAML-ish DSL for the crayola crew who haven't learned Go yet.

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No terraform love

Terraform 0.12 was awesome. It had no supply-chain sploit risk, ran well, accepted add-ons easily, and was very powerful.

Then they got a registry for people to attack, an umbilical to operation that ubisoft would envy.

I've been unable to get anything newer approved so far, because of the risk . Sure, you firewall off the box running CI, but often it needs to get out to the world, and suddenly it's a WAF on top of everything, and it's a real mess ... which they can eliminate by killing terraform usage altogether. And I don't wanna see that, as while tf's dsl is pretty weird it's the least-worst tool out there.