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I just started using Ansible and am quite impressed with its ease of use. We previously did our server setup manually, but we could automate the whole process p

I just started using Ansible and am quite impressed with its ease of use. We previously did our server setup manually, but we could automate the whole process pretty quickly (I would say 2-3 times the time it costs to set up one deployment manually). The YAML is a bit limiting, as others mention, but to be honest for our use case I'm not sure that we would want to use a more complicated tool instead - there are already more than enough different components and languages in our stack.

user5994461 6y ago
Same experience. It's so easy to bring in and to use it's incredible. I always describe it as "bash on steroid", it's super easy to write and to run remotely on other servers.
iso1631 6y ago
I have a lot of different machines performing different tasks, but very few machines running the same tasks as another one, so it's definitely a case of pets rather than cattle for the bulk of work. For the rare occasions a task needs to be done on a variety of machines, clusterssh does perfectly well. Automation is a preseed, a script to do user management, and a phone home package which sends information about the machine back to a central server. My main bugbear about ansible is it leaves very little trace -- it runs by copying a file to the remote server in /tmp, executing the file (sometimes under sudo), and then deleting it. I get the notification on syslog that ansible has logged in and done something, but I don't know what, so I rely on the ansible Compared to when someone manually goes in and does something like "sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf" - even if doing it en-mass, I get notification that joebloggs logged in at 14:53 on Wednesday and edited resolv.conf. If I see something broke about 3pm on Wednesday, that's a great start to working out why it's broken. Ansible means I need to look at the ansible logs, but even then I don't know exactly what was actually executed on the box. Then of course there's "to foul thing up is ssh, to really foul things up requires ansible" angle too. Automation massively increases the amount of

user5994461 6y ago

Same experience. It's so easy to bring in and to use it's incredible. I always describe it as "bash on steroid", it's super easy to write and to run remotely on other servers.

iso1631 6y ago

I have a lot of different machines performing different tasks, but very few machines running the same tasks as another one, so it's definitely a case of pets rather than cattle for the bulk of work. For the rare occasions a task needs to be done on a variety of machines, clusterssh does perfectly well. Automation is a preseed, a script to do user management, and a phone home package which sends information about the machine back to a central server. My main bugbear about ansible is it leaves very little trace -- it runs by copying a file to the remote server in /tmp, executing the file (sometimes under sudo), and then deleting it. I get the notification on syslog that ansible has logged in and done something, but I don't know what, so I rely on the ansible Compared to when someone manually goes in and does something like "sudo vi /etc/resolv.conf" - even if doing it en-mass, I get notification that joebloggs logged in at 14:53 on Wednesday and edited resolv.conf. If I see something broke about 3pm on Wednesday, that's a great start to working out why it's broken. Ansible means I need to look at the ansible logs, but even then I don't know exactly what was actually executed on the box. Then of course there's "to foul thing up is ssh, to really foul things up requires ansible" angle too. Automation massively increases the amount of