Since when is YAML readable and clean?
I hate anything that uses python or depends on whitespace in it’s code. Nothing but fucking problems. You know what’s hard to see an extra space in a line of code. A missing semicolon is so much easier to find.
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?
I’ve been using Ansible for almost 10 years now and one thing I learned is to keep things simple, most issues I had with Ansible in the past were due to me taking the wrong approach to problem solving. In way, it forced me to not overcomplicate things.
I’m not the biggest fan of it, but I do prefer it over other IaCs.
edit: tbh my biggest issue with Ansible is other people who ask me “why not wrtie a bash script instead?”
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
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.
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
I also appreciate the alternative suggestion. No terraform love?
Terraform and Ansible do different things, they do have overlapping features, but ultimately they’re meant to do different things. I use them both at my current job with Terraform running Ansible
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.
Wtf is SSH and why should I care?
SSH is a network protocol for making secure connections, allowing remote access to various systems. As for why you should care, if you didn’t know what SSH was, then you probably shouldn’t care since you aren’t the target audience. It’s fringe knowledge for me too.
“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
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.
Mm, I love stacking weird formats. How many backslashes do I need for a regular expression to work right? 🥵
Jist wait until you have to start fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python for different targets.
Because group or host vars are hard?
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.
That’s not entirely true. You could use Ansible Navigator and Execution Environments.
