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> Ansible is great. Used that for management hundreds of machines at multiple jobs. It's been bought by RedHat, it's well maintained and I think it will have th

> Ansible is great. Used that for management hundreds of machines at multiple jobs. It's been bought by RedHat, it's well maintained and I think it will have the brightest long term future. A lot of folks I know have been bitten by Ansible's performance (Ansible has a central master that runs recipes on each node, rather than having nodes "pull" from a central master).

Florin_Andrei 9y ago
Ansible has a very, very low barrier to entry. You go from 0 to 100 in a very short time. It makes a lot of sense to use it when you just begin building your infrastructure. Later on you can run Ansible Tower, deploy Ansible agents everywhere, and basically use Ansible under the same client/server model like all the other tools. Salt is eerily similar to Ansible, it's just geared towards client/server. Being experienced with Ansible, it was weird at first to use Salt because everything looked familiar, yet slightly different.
- ofrzeta 9y ago
  You can also get Tower's functionality with the free version called AWX, although not as polished. https://github.com/ansible/awx https://github.com/ansible/awx
brightball 9y ago
Ansible has a pull mode that can be turned on. There are some trade-offs with it from the normal operating model, but it's there when you get large enough to need it. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/ansible-pull.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/ansible-pull.html
user5994461 9y ago
I believe you are talking about Ansible tower, the paid tool from RedHat that gives a centralized server. Ansible is not centralized. It configures servers with SSH and can operate from any user or host who has ssh access.
- voltagex_ 9y ago
  Yeah but when you run a playbook it's running from a single machine which is calling out via SSH
  - user5994461 9y ago
    Yes. The host will run 100% CPU to handle the hundreds of SSH connections. I've been re configuring 300 to 800 hosts many times a day, never had a problem. I think it would take a few thousands hosts for the performance to be noticeably slow and I am really not sure that other tools or systems could take it much better.
    - virgilp 9y ago
      I know our SREs once screwed the config for sshd, and considered themselves very lucky that they had puppet on the machines and could push a fixed configuration (if they had used exclusively ansible, that'd be the end of it - no way to connect or to deploy new configuration) [edit] To clarify - ansible is great, and we use it. Just saying that, as everything, it still has (sometimes subtle) downsides in various scenarios. If it works well for you - great, but maybe others really were bitten by it.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        Well, teach your sysadmin to use the system configuration tester when they edit a system configuration file. Nothing to do with ansible really, except that ansible allows to prevent that easily.
        dozzie 9y ago
        > Well, teach your sysadmin to use the system configuration tester when they edit a system configuration file. Wrong. Teach your sysadmin not to overload a single service with different functions (debugging channel, user-facing shell service, running remote commands, file upload, and config distribution channel), especially not the one that should not be used in batch mode, without human supervision. When you write an application, you don't put a HTTP server in database connection handling code, but when it comes to server management, suddenly the very same approach is deemed brilliant, because you don't run an agent (which is false, because you do, it's just not a dedicated agent).

Florin_Andrei 9y ago

Ansible has a very, very low barrier to entry. You go from 0 to 100 in a very short time. It makes a lot of sense to use it when you just begin building your infrastructure. Later on you can run Ansible Tower, deploy Ansible agents everywhere, and basically use Ansible under the same client/server model like all the other tools. Salt is eerily similar to Ansible, it's just geared towards client/server. Being experienced with Ansible, it was weird at first to use Salt because everything looked familiar, yet slightly different.

ofrzeta 9y ago
You can also get Tower's functionality with the free version called AWX, although not as polished. https://github.com/ansible/awx https://github.com/ansible/awx

brightball 9y ago

Ansible has a pull mode that can be turned on. There are some trade-offs with it from the normal operating model, but it's there when you get large enough to need it. https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/ansible-pull.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/2.4/ansible-pull.html

user5994461 9y ago

I believe you are talking about Ansible tower, the paid tool from RedHat that gives a centralized server. Ansible is not centralized. It configures servers with SSH and can operate from any user or host who has ssh access.

voltagex_ 9y ago
Yeah but when you run a playbook it's running from a single machine which is calling out via SSH
- user5994461 9y ago
  Yes. The host will run 100% CPU to handle the hundreds of SSH connections. I've been re configuring 300 to 800 hosts many times a day, never had a problem. I think it would take a few thousands hosts for the performance to be noticeably slow and I am really not sure that other tools or systems could take it much better.
  - virgilp 9y ago
    I know our SREs once screwed the config for sshd, and considered themselves very lucky that they had puppet on the machines and could push a fixed configuration (if they had used exclusively ansible, that'd be the end of it - no way to connect or to deploy new configuration) [edit] To clarify - ansible is great, and we use it. Just saying that, as everything, it still has (sometimes subtle) downsides in various scenarios. If it works well for you - great, but maybe others really were bitten by it.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      Well, teach your sysadmin to use the system configuration tester when they edit a system configuration file. Nothing to do with ansible really, except that ansible allows to prevent that easily.
      - dozzie 9y ago
        > Well, teach your sysadmin to use the system configuration tester when they edit a system configuration file. Wrong. Teach your sysadmin not to overload a single service with different functions (debugging channel, user-facing shell service, running remote commands, file upload, and config distribution channel), especially not the one that should not be used in batch mode, without human supervision. When you write an application, you don't put a HTTP server in database connection handling code, but when it comes to server management, suddenly the very same approach is deemed brilliant, because you don't run an agent (which is false, because you do, it's just not a dedicated agent).