7 ms·

Ansible 2.10

90 points by sm4rk0 6y ago

sm4rk0 6y ago
Main change: "Ansible engine" is decoupled from "Ansible content" (modules and plugins).
- gjvc 6y ago
  This is a big deal, and very welcome.
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  Note that Ansible 2.10 is now packaged two ways: 'ansible-base' ( just the engine and a few core modules), and 'ansible' (not yet released - Ansible base plus a bundle of all the modules and plugins that were in what was before just Ansible 2.9).
donedealomg 6y ago
Immutable infrastructure killed Ansible.
user5994461 6y ago
Doesn't work? Secure Connection Failed: Error code SSL_ERROR_BAD_MAC_READ
stedaniels 6y ago
The direct Google Groups list I think: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ansible-project/_oKp-lYmhwU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ansible-project/_oKp...
- opk 6y ago
  That link seems to require a google account to access. So the mail-archive.com link was rather more useful.
sgt 6y ago
Recently started using this. Works brilliantly for our production infrastructure. Well done to Ansible team.
markuman123 6y ago
no no no, it's alpha9, not stable yet!
- markuman123 6y ago
  > 2020-09-22: ansible-2.10 GA release date.
  - markuman123 6y ago
    https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/COLLECTIONS_2_10.html#release-schedule https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/COLLECTIONS_2...
- sm4rk0 6y ago
  Right! I'm sorry for misinformation! @dang, could you please rename this to: Ansible-base 2.10.0 released
tbran 6y ago
Love using Ansible (though I don't always love writing YAML). PROTIP: I use it to manage my laptops/workstations with a hosts entry like: [laptop-thinkpad] localhost ansible_connection=local Sometimes I think it's overkill, but the config files are a little easier to visually parse.
- INTPenis 6y ago
  Deprecated group name format. ;) I started using Ansible when it was brand new, like 0.2 I believe. It changes so fast that I've had junior co-workers come in and teach me new best practices in Ansible.
  - apple4ever 6y ago
    That deprecation was deprecated :)
    - INTPenis 6y ago
      No way, you're kidding!
- l-p 6y ago
  First I used debian packages and maintained a (multiarch!) repository to setup my computers, then I used Ansible and had to first install Python and SSH on every machine, now I just run a script and I'm done in a few minutes and very few manual steps. I found Ansible for personal computers to be brittle and cumbersome as reinstalls are usually for OS upgrades and those tend to have breaking changes.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Another nice trick is to use your shebang line. #!/usr/bin/env ansible-playbook --- - hosts: localhost connection: local vars: home: "{{ lookup('env', 'HOME') }}" tasks: # ... So then it just becomes. pip install -r requirements.txt ./install --tags=bash
ganstyles 6y ago
Someone made the comment below, which can't be responded to, but I did have a question about it. The comment: > Immutable infrastructure killed Ansible. I haven't used Ansible in several years, but when I was using it I was using it to build immutable AMIs. So obviously this comment is off base. However, I have been using terraform for years now. Can anyone describe why one might use Ansible over Terraform? I understand the differences, but I don't think I know people using Ansible as their primary deployment/provisioning solution recently.
- tyree731 6y ago
  > Can anyone describe why one might use Ansible over Terraform? Anywhere you're dealing with bare metal you can't really use Terraform. Terraform also doesn't get you much within a host, so to speak. One example of that idea, if you use Packer to bake AMIs, with Ansible as the provisioner, you get the simplicity of Packer with the integrated secrets management and templating of Ansible. Also, not everything is an immutable infrastructure change. Sometimes you just need to do things repeatably against a set of hosts, and Ansible is good at that.
  - escardin 6y ago
    The tooling for Terraform with bare metal is poor, but it is out there. There are plugins for MAAS, Cobbler, Some giant HPE thing I never wanted to touch. If you're willing to write code, I found it a good fit for provisioning servers over ILO/Redfish.
    - tyree731 6y ago
      Good to know, I'll check it out at some point.
- manishsharan 6y ago
  I began using Ansible much before I learnt of Terraform . However , my Ansible scripts have been working flawlessly and the Python plugins and YAML makes it easy for me to figure out what it was that I wrote so many years ago.( Note to self -- must learn Terraform, Packer).
avolcano 6y ago
Ansible has been nice for replacing a bunch of ad-hoc shell scripts for my Digital Ocean boxes for personal projects. I have a bunch of simple provisioning scripts I can re-run as many times as I want, and I have simple deploy scripts that automatically skip unnecessary steps. Cannot imagine a better tool for single-host devops, really - if I were putting together a list of "how to run your own small infrastructure" it'd be higher priority than anything else. I am curious, as a bit of a devops outsider, how it fits into the toolset of a modern application. From what I can tell, a lot of the aspects of Ansible are made redundant in a world of _hosted_ containers - you don't need Ansible if you're, say, deploying container images to EKS/ECS/whatever - but if you were to self-host your Docker hosts (or... whatever the Kubernetes is equivalent is called), Ansible still seems to me to be the best tool around for standing up and maintaining those hosts.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Ansible is one of those tools that is so general that it can just absorb whatever operational complexity you throw at it. It might not be pretty, and you might want to tattoo the Jinja and YAML specs on your arm but even in the world of hosted containers I still use it to act as the glue for the disparate systems I have to coordinate. Having Ansible actually completely manage our hosted k8s environment has been really nice since Ansible has gone through the effort of gritting their teeth on templating and manipulating YAML in a semi-sane way. I've tried and tried to like Helm but you just hit the ceiling of what's possible so fast. Being able to add new filters, expose new/dynamic data to templates, pull data from outside sources, and have both Ansible-lang and Python as escape-hatches is something I don't want to give up.
- escardin 6y ago
  Ansible is a good choice for maintaining the k8s infra itself, but IMO is not good at maintaining hardware or managing containers. The major problem with Ansible compared to container orchestrators is that Ansible has no concept of previously known state. It makes some things that are easy in Terraform (deletions) more difficult, as you have to write a new playbook to delete stuff. So can't say, "I don't want to run this nginx container on this host anymore" by just removing that host from the part of your inventory that gets nginx, or removing nginx from that hosts playbook. You have to explicitly remove it. This is not a huge problem if you're into immutable infrastructure, where you just wipe any host and redeploy, as it lets you go from known state to known state reliably. This kind of relgates Ansible to yaml shell scripts, but it's generally a lot tidier and gives you a nice framework for knowing where you are in your script. When trying to apply Ansible to more infrastructure related stuff, again, it can do it, but's not the right tool. You can write a playbook to deploy a host or scale your EC2, but you basically have to do that separate from the provisioning of the hosts you just deployed. For container orchestration, I found Ansible more of a hinderance than a help. Ansible is very imperative, and most orchestration tools are deliberately declarative. There's no particular reason to use it to deploy, scale, delete basically anything in k8s or swarm, as there is very little value add over using the tools themselves. Overall I find Ansible best suited to building the containers or vms that you will run on your cluster, as these are necessarily imperative steps that fit it well. This also applies to the hosts that make up your cluster, if you aren't able to prepare an immutable image for them or get them to auto join.

Ansible 2.10

90 points by sm4rk0 6y ago

sm4rk0 6y ago

Main change: "Ansible engine" is decoupled from "Ansible content" (modules and plugins).

gjvc 6y ago
This is a big deal, and very welcome.
geerlingguy 6y ago
Note that Ansible 2.10 is now packaged two ways: 'ansible-base' ( just the engine and a few core modules), and 'ansible' (not yet released - Ansible base plus a bundle of all the modules and plugins that were in what was before just Ansible 2.9).

donedealomg 6y ago

Immutable infrastructure killed Ansible.

user5994461 6y ago

Doesn't work? Secure Connection Failed: Error code SSL_ERROR_BAD_MAC_READ

stedaniels 6y ago

The direct Google Groups list I think: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ansible-project/_oKp-lYmhwU https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/ansible-project/_oKp...

opk 6y ago
That link seems to require a google account to access. So the mail-archive.com link was rather more useful.

sgt 6y ago

Recently started using this. Works brilliantly for our production infrastructure. Well done to Ansible team.

markuman123 6y ago

no no no, it's alpha9, not stable yet!

markuman123 6y ago
> 2020-09-22: ansible-2.10 GA release date.
- markuman123 6y ago
  https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/COLLECTIONS_2_10.html#release-schedule https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/devel/roadmap/COLLECTIONS_2...
sm4rk0 6y ago
Right! I'm sorry for misinformation! @dang, could you please rename this to: Ansible-base 2.10.0 released

tbran 6y ago

Love using Ansible (though I don't always love writing YAML). PROTIP: I use it to manage my laptops/workstations with a hosts entry like: [laptop-thinkpad] localhost ansible_connection=local Sometimes I think it's overkill, but the config files are a little easier to visually parse.

INTPenis 6y ago
Deprecated group name format. ;) I started using Ansible when it was brand new, like 0.2 I believe. It changes so fast that I've had junior co-workers come in and teach me new best practices in Ansible.
- apple4ever 6y ago
  That deprecation was deprecated :)
  - INTPenis 6y ago
    No way, you're kidding!
l-p 6y ago
First I used debian packages and maintained a (multiarch!) repository to setup my computers, then I used Ansible and had to first install Python and SSH on every machine, now I just run a script and I'm done in a few minutes and very few manual steps. I found Ansible for personal computers to be brittle and cumbersome as reinstalls are usually for OS upgrades and those tend to have breaking changes.
Spivak 6y ago
Another nice trick is to use your shebang line. #!/usr/bin/env ansible-playbook --- - hosts: localhost connection: local vars: home: "{{ lookup('env', 'HOME') }}" tasks: # ... So then it just becomes. pip install -r requirements.txt ./install --tags=bash

ganstyles 6y ago

Someone made the comment below, which can't be responded to, but I did have a question about it. The comment: > Immutable infrastructure killed Ansible. I haven't used Ansible in several years, but when I was using it I was using it to build immutable AMIs. So obviously this comment is off base. However, I have been using terraform for years now. Can anyone describe why one might use Ansible over Terraform? I understand the differences, but I don't think I know people using Ansible as their primary deployment/provisioning solution recently.

tyree731 6y ago
> Can anyone describe why one might use Ansible over Terraform? Anywhere you're dealing with bare metal you can't really use Terraform. Terraform also doesn't get you much within a host, so to speak. One example of that idea, if you use Packer to bake AMIs, with Ansible as the provisioner, you get the simplicity of Packer with the integrated secrets management and templating of Ansible. Also, not everything is an immutable infrastructure change. Sometimes you just need to do things repeatably against a set of hosts, and Ansible is good at that.
- escardin 6y ago
  The tooling for Terraform with bare metal is poor, but it is out there. There are plugins for MAAS, Cobbler, Some giant HPE thing I never wanted to touch. If you're willing to write code, I found it a good fit for provisioning servers over ILO/Redfish.
  - tyree731 6y ago
    Good to know, I'll check it out at some point.
manishsharan 6y ago
I began using Ansible much before I learnt of Terraform . However , my Ansible scripts have been working flawlessly and the Python plugins and YAML makes it easy for me to figure out what it was that I wrote so many years ago.( Note to self -- must learn Terraform, Packer).

avolcano 6y ago

Ansible has been nice for replacing a bunch of ad-hoc shell scripts for my Digital Ocean boxes for personal projects. I have a bunch of simple provisioning scripts I can re-run as many times as I want, and I have simple deploy scripts that automatically skip unnecessary steps. Cannot imagine a better tool for single-host devops, really - if I were putting together a list of "how to run your own small infrastructure" it'd be higher priority than anything else. I am curious, as a bit of a devops outsider, how it fits into the toolset of a modern application. From what I can tell, a lot of the aspects of Ansible are made redundant in a world of _hosted_ containers - you don't need Ansible if you're, say, deploying container images to EKS/ECS/whatever - but if you were to self-host your Docker hosts (or... whatever the Kubernetes is equivalent is called), Ansible still seems to me to be the best tool around for standing up and maintaining those hosts.

Spivak 6y ago
Ansible is one of those tools that is so general that it can just absorb whatever operational complexity you throw at it. It might not be pretty, and you might want to tattoo the Jinja and YAML specs on your arm but even in the world of hosted containers I still use it to act as the glue for the disparate systems I have to coordinate. Having Ansible actually completely manage our hosted k8s environment has been really nice since Ansible has gone through the effort of gritting their teeth on templating and manipulating YAML in a semi-sane way. I've tried and tried to like Helm but you just hit the ceiling of what's possible so fast. Being able to add new filters, expose new/dynamic data to templates, pull data from outside sources, and have both Ansible-lang and Python as escape-hatches is something I don't want to give up.
escardin 6y ago
Ansible is a good choice for maintaining the k8s infra itself, but IMO is not good at maintaining hardware or managing containers. The major problem with Ansible compared to container orchestrators is that Ansible has no concept of previously known state. It makes some things that are easy in Terraform (deletions) more difficult, as you have to write a new playbook to delete stuff. So can't say, "I don't want to run this nginx container on this host anymore" by just removing that host from the part of your inventory that gets nginx, or removing nginx from that hosts playbook. You have to explicitly remove it. This is not a huge problem if you're into immutable infrastructure, where you just wipe any host and redeploy, as it lets you go from known state to known state reliably. This kind of relgates Ansible to yaml shell scripts, but it's generally a lot tidier and gives you a nice framework for knowing where you are in your script. When trying to apply Ansible to more infrastructure related stuff, again, it can do it, but's not the right tool. You can write a playbook to deploy a host or scale your EC2, but you basically have to do that separate from the provisioning of the hosts you just deployed. For container orchestration, I found Ansible more of a hinderance than a help. Ansible is very imperative, and most orchestration tools are deliberately declarative. There's no particular reason to use it to deploy, scale, delete basically anything in k8s or swarm, as there is very little value add over using the tools themselves. Overall I find Ansible best suited to building the containers or vms that you will run on your cluster, as these are necessarily imperative steps that fit it well. This also applies to the hosts that make up your cluster, if you aren't able to prepare an immutable image for them or get them to auto join.