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.
Thanks for including an alternative you’d recommend!
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.
But then again, Oracle now owns Redhat, so…
IBM owns Red Hat.
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. :-P
mgmtconfig
Never heard of that, will be looking into it
“Keep it simple” says the project that decided it would be great to program in YAML…
I’ve tried using it to manage a few home servers and parameterizing anything was painful and boilerplate-ridden
Anyone that says yaml is readable is psychotic. It’s literally objectively not readable because a random white space character can break the entire thing and that’s by definition not readable I can’t see whether there’s a white space or not without explicitly setting that up in an editor
THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I’M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!
I have to say, the resurgence of this energy in the last whenever has been refreshing. Can’t we all just crank our hogs?