4 ms·

Ansible is one "ohh shiny" thing that has greatly increased my productivity as a sysadmin. Before that I would automate what I could with ssh and pdsh and scrip

Ansible is one "ohh shiny" thing that has greatly increased my productivity as a sysadmin. Before that I would automate what I could with ssh and pdsh and scripts, but it was never as well polished as Ansible. I'm even using ansible for ad-hoc stuff (tweaking a config, restarting a service) because it's easier to do that from a management server than log in to some remote host, get oriented as to the OS distribution and version, and run commends in the shell there.

noir_lord 8y ago
I like ansible with vagrant as well - it makes for a nice clean way of deploying to development environments while also been nicely 'self' documenting and not limiting (you can drop back to shell), it's a lovely tool for the most part. Edit: The thing I really like about Ansible is how unsexy it is, it's just a nice sane way of doing largely what you could do yourself with ssh and bash but in a language that doesn't make you want to cry. I've been around linux since the 90's and Ansible feels comfortable, predictable and stable - what you would want in a piece of software that can be mission critical in the most fundamental sense.
- dozzie 8y ago
  It would be even nicer if people weren't advocating it as a configuration management system, only as what it is: a deployment system.
  - ci5er 8y ago
    Who advocates it as a configuration management system? I've not seen that...
    - nunez 8y ago
      Everyone compares it to chef and puppet
      - ci5er 8y ago
        Ansible? I could see using it to build a container that then got "orchestrated", I guess, but ... hmmm. I've never really looked at them as doing the same thing. (Nor have I looked at either Chef/Puppet for CM. Maybe I'm just stupid... My ex- certainly thinks that I am...)
    - resonator 8y ago
      https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/configuration-management https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/configuration-management
  - switch007 8y ago
    It calls itself one, I imagine many people also consider it one. What is a true configuration management system?
    - Jedd 8y ago
      I used puppet -- unhappily -- for a while before discovering SaltStack. Salt, like Ansible, is a response to the Puppet/Chef hegemony -- ruby and DSL's and tacked-together bits that are a nightmare to install and upgrade in themselves). I'd suggest Salt did some things much cleaner than Ansible, and while it can be an orchestrator, and deployment system, it also excels as a configuration management system ... but I think typically people are talking about configuration management systems that are tightly coupled with more formal change management systems (of which I've found pretty much none that work well).
  - piva00 8y ago
    I think I achieved my perfect balance of tooling for current systems with Ansible and Docker. Ansible automates even provisioning in AWS. I never really liked CloudFormation's way of creating stacks, so I began to use Ansible to document the application's stack, have used it to deploy systems running in EC2 with RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc. After provisioning/configuring I'd end up with an instance in EC2 with Docker installed and from there our CI/CD would just trigger the deployment playbook that simply would do a `docker pull` of the version tagged for release and start the container. Ansible helped to also install our Splunk forwarders as running it from Docker was a hassle still not so long ago, so we would have the best of both worlds: configurability of the host machine completely with Ansible and packaging and predictability of deployment through Docker. I advocate this stack as simple enough to learn and use with widely used tools without their fancy (and often broken) features. Even though they can be still a bit immature, they are production-ready enough.

noir_lord 8y ago

I like ansible with vagrant as well - it makes for a nice clean way of deploying to development environments while also been nicely 'self' documenting and not limiting (you can drop back to shell), it's a lovely tool for the most part. Edit: The thing I really like about Ansible is how unsexy it is, it's just a nice sane way of doing largely what you could do yourself with ssh and bash but in a language that doesn't make you want to cry. I've been around linux since the 90's and Ansible feels comfortable, predictable and stable - what you would want in a piece of software that can be mission critical in the most fundamental sense.

dozzie 8y ago
It would be even nicer if people weren't advocating it as a configuration management system, only as what it is: a deployment system.
- ci5er 8y ago
  Who advocates it as a configuration management system? I've not seen that...
  - nunez 8y ago
    Everyone compares it to chef and puppet
    - ci5er 8y ago
      Ansible? I could see using it to build a container that then got "orchestrated", I guess, but ... hmmm. I've never really looked at them as doing the same thing. (Nor have I looked at either Chef/Puppet for CM. Maybe I'm just stupid... My ex- certainly thinks that I am...)
  - resonator 8y ago
    https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/configuration-management https://www.ansible.com/use-cases/configuration-management
- switch007 8y ago
  It calls itself one, I imagine many people also consider it one. What is a true configuration management system?
  - Jedd 8y ago
    I used puppet -- unhappily -- for a while before discovering SaltStack. Salt, like Ansible, is a response to the Puppet/Chef hegemony -- ruby and DSL's and tacked-together bits that are a nightmare to install and upgrade in themselves). I'd suggest Salt did some things much cleaner than Ansible, and while it can be an orchestrator, and deployment system, it also excels as a configuration management system ... but I think typically people are talking about configuration management systems that are tightly coupled with more formal change management systems (of which I've found pretty much none that work well).
- piva00 8y ago
  I think I achieved my perfect balance of tooling for current systems with Ansible and Docker. Ansible automates even provisioning in AWS. I never really liked CloudFormation's way of creating stacks, so I began to use Ansible to document the application's stack, have used it to deploy systems running in EC2 with RDS, ElastiCache, SQS, SNS, DynamoDB, etc. After provisioning/configuring I'd end up with an instance in EC2 with Docker installed and from there our CI/CD would just trigger the deployment playbook that simply would do a `docker pull` of the version tagged for release and start the container. Ansible helped to also install our Splunk forwarders as running it from Docker was a hassle still not so long ago, so we would have the best of both worlds: configurability of the host machine completely with Ansible and packaging and predictability of deployment through Docker. I advocate this stack as simple enough to learn and use with widely used tools without their fancy (and often broken) features. Even though they can be still a bit immature, they are production-ready enough.