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It's clear you're a developer and not a systems engineer.

by movedx 11y ago

dkarapetyan 11y ago
I like to think I'm a generic problem solver that through accidents of history has ended up using software instead of pencil and paper to solve problems. In another life pencil and paper was adequate. Systems, programming, administration is all the same to me. I don't discriminate. I also like to use actual programming languages instead of their yaml based bastardizations.
- movedx 11y ago
  "I also like to use actual programming languages instead of their yaml based bastardizations." I think the problem here is confusion, and I see it a lot in the Ansible community. What you're doing, and I can completely understand why, is taking Ansible as being a programming language for defining state. That isn't what Ansible is designed to be. That YAML you speak of is designed to allow you to define state in a format that is not only human readable, but also machine readable. All that YAML is meant to do is say: x=y. it's not trying to be a programming language or a scripting interface, it's simply a means of setting the state you want. This is a common pitfall a lot of people fall into when they approach Ansible, and I'm always seeing questions on IRC like: "How do I code Ansible to pull down a file, read it, process it, and after doing some logic, do X?" The answer is: you're using Ansible wrong. Use it as a state management system and only a state management system, and you won't go wrong. Use a scripting or programming language, write a script/program, and run that on the remote machine if you need highly complex logic to determine state.
edcastro 11y ago
That. Indeed there's a whole different mindset for people deploying and orchestrathing servers based on their 'previous' background. On the previous iteration of CM, I noticed that people that had a prior background on development usually chose Chef, while the SysAdms chose Puppet.

It's clear you're a developer and not a systems engineer.

by movedx 11y ago

It's clear you're a developer and not a systems engineer.

I like to think I'm a generic problem solver that through accidents of history has ended up using software instead of pencil and paper to solve problems. In another life pencil and paper was adequate. Systems, programming, administration is all the same to me. I don't discriminate. I also like to use actual programming languages instead of their yaml based bastardizations.

movedx 11y ago
"I also like to use actual programming languages instead of their yaml based bastardizations." I think the problem here is confusion, and I see it a lot in the Ansible community. What you're doing, and I can completely understand why, is taking Ansible as being a programming language for defining state. That isn't what Ansible is designed to be. That YAML you speak of is designed to allow you to define state in a format that is not only human readable, but also machine readable. All that YAML is meant to do is say: x=y. it's not trying to be a programming language or a scripting interface, it's simply a means of setting the state you want. This is a common pitfall a lot of people fall into when they approach Ansible, and I'm always seeing questions on IRC like: "How do I code Ansible to pull down a file, read it, process it, and after doing some logic, do X?" The answer is: you're using Ansible wrong. Use it as a state management system and only a state management system, and you won't go wrong. Use a scripting or programming language, write a script/program, and run that on the remote machine if you need highly complex logic to determine state.

edcastro 11y ago

That. Indeed there's a whole different mindset for people deploying and orchestrathing servers based on their 'previous' background. On the previous iteration of CM, I noticed that people that had a prior background on development usually chose Chef, while the SysAdms chose Puppet.