> - Ansible needs no centralized server. No, but it requires the same centralization on a different level: SSH key. Good luck migrating to another one once a n

> - Ansible needs no centralized server. No, but it requires the same centralization on a different level: SSH key. Good luck migrating to another one once a need arises (e.g. one of the sysadmin leaves). > - Ansible does everything over SSH, so you don't need to install client software on all your machines. Once you start configuring SSH, you risk cutting off your debugging channel. Also, you wouldn't put your database connection management in user session handling code in your application, would you? So why mixing two totally separate things in one service? > - YAML as used in Ansible isn't really a DSL [...] You don't have to learn a programming language like Ruby to be productive with it. We've all seen how this was claimed for XSLT: "it's not code! it's human-readable! you don't need to learn anything beside XML!". It didn't end pretty. Why YAML-encoded programming language would be any different? Ansible is not a configuration management tool. Its very architecture (push-based SSH+sudo shell commands) sucks heavily for this task, even if you only have a dozen servers. It was never designed to keep OS state as encoded in intents. Ansible is just a tool that somebody hacked for their specific deployment case and then advertised as a general-purpose tool.