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There is plethora of similar tools (cssh, pssh, dsh) but Ansible ad-hoc mode superseeds these ones at any real task involving "simultaneous" management of Linux

There is plethora of similar tools (cssh, pssh, dsh) but Ansible ad-hoc mode superseeds these ones at any real task involving "simultaneous" management of Linux boxes.

bonoboTP 7y ago
Why is Ansible better? I've considered it for maintaining a bunch of workstations and servers. However after reading some tutorials it seems not to be worth it. It involves a whole new level of indirection, I now have to check up on what's new in new versions of Ansible, perhaps adjust a bit on the syntax, Google problems, find relevant Github issues or SO answers that work around the inevitable weird quirks and bugs etc. I think Ansible would have to provide a lot of value (i.e. time savings) compared to, say pssh or cssh to be considered for a busy sysadmin who just wants to get stuff done with as little effort as possible (CV padding is not a consideration, playing with new toys is not a consideration). Doing things directly with shell scripts is a much more robust approach in terms of being understandable to other people, who don't know Ansible, and it will stay understandable even after Ansible is gone. There's also a proliferation of such tools. Do I need Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Salt or another one? Will Ansible die in 2 years and be superseded by X? Unless you do this job as a full-time sysadmin, the overhead and potential headaches seem to be more than to be worth it. I may be wrong though.
- scarby2 7y ago
  the commenter here is talking specifically about ad-hoc commands: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_adhoc.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_adh... these are pretty easy to understand. Also chef, puppet and ansible are becoming very niche tools these days now that we have kubernetes and docker, all we really need them for is provisioning out k8s infra if we run bare metal. Terraform is a different tool entirely working at a different level.

There is plethora of similar tools (cssh, pssh, dsh) but Ansible ad-hoc mode superseeds these ones at any real task involving "simultaneous" management of Linux boxes.

bonoboTP 7y ago

Why is Ansible better? I've considered it for maintaining a bunch of workstations and servers. However after reading some tutorials it seems not to be worth it. It involves a whole new level of indirection, I now have to check up on what's new in new versions of Ansible, perhaps adjust a bit on the syntax, Google problems, find relevant Github issues or SO answers that work around the inevitable weird quirks and bugs etc. I think Ansible would have to provide a lot of value (i.e. time savings) compared to, say pssh or cssh to be considered for a busy sysadmin who just wants to get stuff done with as little effort as possible (CV padding is not a consideration, playing with new toys is not a consideration). Doing things directly with shell scripts is a much more robust approach in terms of being understandable to other people, who don't know Ansible, and it will stay understandable even after Ansible is gone. There's also a proliferation of such tools. Do I need Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Terraform, Salt or another one? Will Ansible die in 2 years and be superseded by X? Unless you do this job as a full-time sysadmin, the overhead and potential headaches seem to be more than to be worth it. I may be wrong though.

scarby2 7y ago
the commenter here is talking specifically about ad-hoc commands: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_adhoc.html https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/intro_adh... these are pretty easy to understand. Also chef, puppet and ansible are becoming very niche tools these days now that we have kubernetes and docker, all we really need them for is provisioning out k8s infra if we run bare metal. Terraform is a different tool entirely working at a different level.