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This is fascinating to me, as someone who manages and Ansible-based config management infra that keeps thousands of servers running. The problem I have with Ans

This is fascinating to me, as someone who manages and Ansible-based config management infra that keeps thousands of servers running. The problem I have with Ansible isn’t the YAML, it’s the Python. I spend at least half my time struggling with reconciling which Python runtime and modules are installed on which hosts. And between the Python 2 EOL, the growth of ARM hosts in our inventory, a fuzzy and changing line between what’s “Ansible” or “Python” or “Jinja” in the syntax, and regular OS upgrades, it’s a lot more work than it ought to be. And at scale there are some really frustrating performance issues that aren’t entirely Python’s fault but which would be much better if we could use native code. I’ve been hoping for years that someone would build a Golang tool that could take Ansible playbooks and do the right thing with minimal tweaking, but I think we’re beyond the point where anyone is going to invest that much time and effort into new CM tooling.

stevekemp 6y ago
I suspect if anybody is going to write something new it won't benefit so much by being constrained by Ansible's YAML parser, etc. I toyed with writing a simple thing, inspired by Fabric, and that was moderately useful: https://github.com/skx/deployr https://github.com/skx/deployr Later I tried again, with something more puppet-like, to experiment with how you might handle dependencies in a simple and consistent fashion, ideally without using a complete language (i.e. puppet/ruby): https://github.com/skx/marionette/ https://github.com/skx/marionette/ The problem with the simpler approach is that they do only basic things, to support "everything" means writing a hell of a lot of glue, and making a lot of busywork until it is remotely useful to others. Puppet/CFengine/Chef/Salt/Ansible sometimes seem like they're a dead-end with how many things are moving to master /golden images (packer, etc), and containers.

stevekemp 6y ago

I suspect if anybody is going to write something new it won't benefit so much by being constrained by Ansible's YAML parser, etc. I toyed with writing a simple thing, inspired by Fabric, and that was moderately useful: https://github.com/skx/deployr https://github.com/skx/deployr Later I tried again, with something more puppet-like, to experiment with how you might handle dependencies in a simple and consistent fashion, ideally without using a complete language (i.e. puppet/ruby): https://github.com/skx/marionette/ https://github.com/skx/marionette/ The problem with the simpler approach is that they do only basic things, to support "everything" means writing a hell of a lot of glue, and making a lot of busywork until it is remotely useful to others. Puppet/CFengine/Chef/Salt/Ansible sometimes seem like they're a dead-end with how many things are moving to master /golden images (packer, etc), and containers.