Fair question. Ansible is a great system, with a terrible DSL. YAML is not a programming language, and deployment is not a toy task. You need power. The resu

Fair question. Ansible is a great system, with a terrible DSL. YAML is not a programming language, and deployment is not a toy task. You need power. The result is that ansible has pushed a markup language to its limit, then pushed the templating engine used in it to its limit too. Then used a bunch of duck tape + conventions to glue everything and ended up with 10% of an unclean verbose unexpressive real programming language with ridiculous limited tooling, testability and had to document + support it. As with most DSL. For what? For the quest of having something "declarative", and that any language could read. Well you can have declarative API written in any language, and nobody except ansible ever read playbooks. In the end, it's just a big weight at the ankle. I never ever used it and though, "damn, what a pleasant tech choice, I'm happy they didn't directly expose the API through Python". It's the same reason I use "nox" and not "tox", or "doit" and not "make". DSL really seem like a great idea, but they fail most of the time. There is a reason only few of them - like SQL, CSS or regex patterns - became a success. 99% of the time, what you need is a good lib, with a well designed API. For the 0.9% of the time you do need multi-language communication, you may implement RPC. Then, only for the 0.01% case should you really consider a DSL. But we geek love to create DSL. They are fun to write! They are so elegant in tutorials! Is Pyinfra doing better? I don't know, but I'm sure to give it a try. I really, really want to leave ansible behind, but fabric 2 is not high level or declarative enough.