# Ansible 120 Hacker News commenters recommended Ansible and 71 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** A battle-tested, widely used way to reproduce server and desktop setups from readable playbooks, though many find its YAML syntax and data manipulation painful. ## Why people recommend it - Reproducible server configuration from git (4 comments): "Everything is deployed from 1 command, from the VMs to the stateful clusters to the docker containers." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47918000)) "so if the server is wiped out for some reason I can be back up and running in a couple minutes" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575404)) "I have a git repo with Ansible scripts that can reproduce my entire server configuration" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47813803)) - Pairs well with Terraform and Docker (4 comments): "Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and modern tools like opentofu, ansible, combined with frontier AI models and harnesses gives you superpowers in this space." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48557190)) "now just use Docker Compose with Ansible directly, still multiple stacks per each of those servers, dead simple" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47742691)) "I have recently started using terraform/tofu and ansible to automate nearly all of the devops operations." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46672038)) - Idempotent, battle-tested, large task library (4 comments): "Ansible has some advantages in that it compares with the current setup to see if it needs to change anything" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46460620)) "battle tested, provides idempotency for most things, and has a large library of tasks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47591788)) "All it sounds like to me is that Ansible is production-ready, Grafana is production ready" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46266097)) - Readable playbooks years later (2 comments): "I can come back to a playbook and understand what it does even if I haven't touched Ansible for years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49000433)) "the vast majority of them that isn't bash scripts is better and more maintainable than their equivalents in pure bash would be" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47290784)) ## What people warn about - YAML and bolted-on control flow (3 comments): "I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597753)) "ansible has quite a few programing structures and is in YAML which is JSON dressed in a config language's clothes." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47379758)) "It's straight python rather than a janky mix of yaml, templates, and bolted-on control flow primitives." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008869)) - Struggles at scale (3 comments): "Chef and even Ansible are much more painful for other reasons once you have more than a handful of nodes to manage." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924757)) "Tell me that you've never used Ansible at scale without telling me that you've never used Ansible at scale." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48393949)) "I don't think anyone who has ever had to deal with high-availability failover would consider Ansible a good solution." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48405016)) - Clumsy data manipulation (2 comments): "The worst part of Ansible is data manipulation, what would be an easy dictionary operation in Python is a huge mix of lookups in Ansible." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009663)) "Pandas, Ansible playbooks, hand-rolled ETL.. they all make you reconstruct intent from control flow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47891795)) - Quirky and painful to use (3 comments): "ansible is one of the nine circles of hell and its support for various AWS services beyond EC2 and S3 is near nonexistant" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083386)) "I finally threw in the towel and forced myself to come to terms with Ansible and it's quirks" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48011743)) "IaC tools like Ansible/Puppet are good alternatives, but coding the whole configuration is not comfortable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49143650)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [PyInfra](https://hackerapproved.com/p/pyinfra.md): 30 recommend - [Puppet](https://hackerapproved.com/p/puppet.md): 16 recommend - [Progress Chef](https://hackerapproved.com/p/chef.md): 10 recommend - [Salt](https://hackerapproved.com/p/salt.md): 9 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Ansible", https://hackerapproved.com/p/ansible/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).