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I have the complete opposite experience. Places that have hundreds of bash scripts that they manually run in a loop like your example are normally a one off ni

I have the complete opposite experience. Places that have hundreds of bash scripts that they manually run in a loop like your example are normally a one off nightmare of random changes in random places with zero consistency, tons of edge cases, and a lot of failure scenarios. Ansible is very entry level friendly, we've had devs grok it in 20-30 minutes and write their own playbooks. We've administrated thousands of servers at scale. We can even use it to package immutable servers with Packer and Terraform, with mostly expected results. I'd choose the latter every time. In the end of the day it's a collection of python modules that people have invested in that let you write steps as plainly as possible in yaml with some light logic involved. Why reinvent the wheel?

scrooched_moose 6y ago
We do realize that's a downside and are very careful about documentation. We only have 2 admins on the system, and both of us are well aware of everything that has been done. Our experience was Ansible was amazing until it isn't. It worked for a while, then any failures would leave systems in an unknown state that had to be verified via adhoc testing like this anyway. Then, when Ansible ran into errors, it was just a pain to get working again. Granted we haven't tried in a couple years. Funny, because to us, Ansible just feels like reinventing the wheel. It's a more complicated tool for pushing text based changes to a group of servers.