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At work I had to set up a server with django, postgres, SSL, rabbitmq, celery and a few other things. I did it in both ansible and docker-compose, the ansible v

At work I had to set up a server with django, postgres, SSL, rabbitmq, celery and a few other things. I did it in both ansible and docker-compose, the ansible version was 1500 lines and docker-compose version was 100 lines. A lot of the ansible stuff is dealing with users, groups, services, supervisord, virtualenvs and repositories - none of this is required in docker as containers restart themselves, users are already set up, you don't need virtualenv, and using containers avoids the need to use repositories to get specific software versions. Also the docker-compose version was much faster to pick up changes, vs minutes for ansible. I don't find docker that useful for developing on a day to dat basis however, it just gets in the way and generally you're not going to need a webserver, SSL, celery, rabbitmq in development anyway. It is useful to debug things locally though. The other reason to use docker is state: while using ansible we got bitten by old dependencies hanging around because ansible doesn't exactly mirror your config, it can really only add stuff. Whereas docker actually wipes the slate clean every single deploy so your server is an exact mirror of your docker-compose file. This is really important.

hibbelig 6y ago
You can tell Ansible that a package should be removed. You just have to remember to do it. If there was ever a statement in your playbook that a package should be added then you can’t assume it will disappear automatically - you have to tell Ansible to remove it.
knowhy 6y ago
Most of the stuff you would be doing with Ansible happens inside the Dockerfiles. So comparing lines of code of your Ansible codebase with just the docker-compose file is not fair towards Ansible.
- willemmerson 6y ago
  That 100 lines includes the Django docker file which is only 5 lines long, there are no other docker files, at least none I have to worry about.
paulryanrogers 6y ago
Cost benefit trade offs of Docker will fit some and not others. For smaller projects with less change and few+standard components Docker is probably overkill. In other cases Ansible is too fiddly or slow. Still important to keep in mind those Docker images must be maintained too.

hibbelig 6y ago

You can tell Ansible that a package should be removed. You just have to remember to do it. If there was ever a statement in your playbook that a package should be added then you can’t assume it will disappear automatically - you have to tell Ansible to remove it.

knowhy 6y ago

Most of the stuff you would be doing with Ansible happens inside the Dockerfiles. So comparing lines of code of your Ansible codebase with just the docker-compose file is not fair towards Ansible.

willemmerson 6y ago
That 100 lines includes the Django docker file which is only 5 lines long, there are no other docker files, at least none I have to worry about.

paulryanrogers 6y ago

Cost benefit trade offs of Docker will fit some and not others. For smaller projects with less change and few+standard components Docker is probably overkill. In other cases Ansible is too fiddly or slow. Still important to keep in mind those Docker images must be maintained too.