Ansible

“I have a relatively lightweight ansible rig that reads containers and relationships desired from a manifest”

“There is more visible projects (eg Ansible) that are great, but with very lackluster monetization”

“I'm also not personally a fan of Ansible, but to claim it doesn't really work is quite breathtaking given the size of the installed base.”

“the genius is presenting it to a regular developer in a way that reads "yes, even you can understand ML, just using a little JSON"”

“IaC tools like Ansible/Puppet are good alternatives, but coding the whole configuration is not comfortable”

“I can come back to a playbook and understand what it does even if I haven't touched Ansible for years.”

“Being able to centralize this config is far more attractive than having a separate Ansible or pyinfra process.”

“Ansible w/ Alma 10 Atomic (there's an rpm-ostree driver, cargo, pipx, etc.) gets the job done with less tokens”

“Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and modern tools like opentofu, ansible, combined with frontier AI models and harnesses gives you superpowers in this space.”

“I don't think anyone who has ever had to deal with high-availability failover would consider Ansible a good solution.”

“Tell me that you've never used Ansible at scale without telling me that you've never used Ansible at scale.”

“I finally threw in the towel and forced myself to come to terms with Ansible and it's quirks”

“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.”

“It's straight python rather than a janky mix of yaml, templates, and bolted-on control flow primitives.”

“Everything is deployed from 1 command, from the VMs to the stateful clusters to the docker containers.”

“Pandas, Ansible playbooks, hand-rolled ETL.. they all make you reconstruct intent from control flow.”

“Something like Ansible can make deterministic bare metal config that could be accessible to more people.”

“I've been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now, mainly to standardize and simplify the process across environments.”

“I have a git repo with Ansible scripts that can reproduce my entire server configuration”

“just have some pre-connect script, that checks if the host is already "configured", and if not, then one-shot some Ansible playbook (or bash even) that installs what's needed”

“now just use Docker Compose with Ansible directly, still multiple stacks per each of those servers, dead simple”

“it's a pretty flexible approach that doesn’t bind me to any specific type of package manager or distro”

“battle tested, provides idempotency for most things, and has a large library of tasks”

“ansible has quite a few programing structures and is in YAML which is JSON dressed in a config language's clothes.”

“the vast majority of them that isn't bash scripts is better and more maintainable than their equivalents in pure bash would be”

“Same for making server config changes with Ansible that I previously didn't due to additional friction - it is mostly just gone”

“Once I realized that most of the work actually performing the setup beyond blank VM creation was in Ansible”

“The experience is generally so much better it's not comparable, and it is much easier to infer running state.”

“ansible is one of the nine circles of hell and its support for various AWS services beyond EC2 and S3 is near nonexistant”

“You can honestly do a lot of what people do with Terraform now just using Docker and Ansible.”

“I have recently started using terraform/tofu and ansible to automate nearly all of the devops operations.”

“I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks”

“so if the server is wiped out for some reason I can be back up and running in a couple minutes”

“it's also really useful to 'ansibilize' your desktop OS in case you need to reinstall”

“Ansible has some advantages in that it compares with the current setup to see if it needs to change anything”

“All it sounds like to me is that Ansible is production-ready, Grafana is production ready”

“Ansible is only slow when run in a remote-push based fashion. As a local config management solution, it can be quite fast.”

“Chef and even Ansible are much more painful for other reasons once you have more than a handful of nodes to manage.”

“Ansible is more of the gold standard but I actually moved to Chef to gain a little more capability.”

“Ansible learned this lesson much earlier and changed syntax of playbooks so that their YAML passes lint.”