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A sysadmin's guide to Ansible: How to simplify tasks
- kqr 8y agoI have always manually done the few sysadmin tasks I do, but recently had reason to learn automation tools. At my current job, I use Ansible because that's what the rest of the team does. However, in my spare time, I discovered CFEngine 3. I would have assumed, given my background of manually performing these tasks, that I would immediately be attracted to Ansible over CFEngine. As it turns out, not at all. Now that I have played around with CFEngine, I keep bumping into issues where it feels like Ansible is in my way, or forces me to do things the complicated way. I know a lot of people disliked the earlier versions of CFEngine, and I do realise the documentation is kind of so-so even for the current versions. But despite these things, what makes people prefer something like Ansible over CFEngine?
- dozzie 8y agoMy guess is that it's because learning a different paradigm is difficult and you don't see its benefits until you're proficient with it. It's like learning functional or logic programming. Ansible gives you merely a way to execute commands on remote servers. Much touted idempotency is not a game changer, it's quite easy to achieve even if you write everything yourself. CFEngine requires a different mindset, you need to (a) think of the servers running independently and (b) configure groups (classes) of servers, not individual servers, even grouped in a list of some kind, like Ansible works. Suddenly an environment becomes much easier to manage.
- IdontRememberIt 8y agoI have enjoyed using Ansible, but I learn and deliver more using simple bash script. I integrated several "concepts" from Ansible in my scripts: idempotence and vault. If my infrastructure were larger, more complexe or required frequent modifications, I would reconsider Ansible again.
- nsomaru 8y agoHow do you implement idempotency? Are any of your scripts open source?
- IdontRememberIt 8y agoI work for a private company, I do not own the code, so I cannot open source it, sorry. :( But if you break your scripts in small parts, it is easy to make it idempotent.
- irl_zebra 8y agoUgh that giant social media sharing platter in the bottom is unremovable on the phone and takes up a bunch of real estate. Going to try to view this on my computer, but for now don't bother if you're on mobile.
- crtasm 8y agoRenders fairly small here, I didn't even notice it. Block addtoany.com to get rid of it.