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Terraform is a massive improvement over Ansible if you do anything non-trivial; even if it sucks, it sucks significantly less than Ansible at managing infrastru
by chousuke 5y ago
Terraform is a massive improvement over Ansible if you do anything non-trivial; even if it sucks, it sucks significantly less than Ansible at managing infrastructure resources.
I sometimes fool myself into thinking I can use Ansible in simple cases and that Terraform would be overkill but so far I've regretted those decisions every time.
- takeda 5y agoAnsible wasn't designed for IaC, but configuration management, and even at that wasn't the best tool. What made it popular was that it was easiest to start with, but that's pretty much all of its strength compared to the competition.
- chousuke 5y agoAnsible is sort of bad at everything, and does a few things decently. I use it as an orchestrator / clusterssh replacement, but for configuration management it makes me nervous because I can't trust it to just not break for stupid reasons.
- takeda 5y agoLast time I used it on Amazon Linux 2 with packer. It worked, but 1/3 of the time it failed with some strange error about yum database corruption. I suspect what was happening is that Amazon Linux on start run yum to apply all available updates, and ansible was not respect yum locks, which is very surprising given that Ansible came from Red Hat so they should have known how important locking is for yum. I ended up using salt (which has its own set of issues) and never looked back.