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I used to reach for shell scripts to configure servers, then Puppet, then Salt, and then finally to Ansible. Configuring servers declaratively is such a massive

I used to reach for shell scripts to configure servers, then Puppet, then Salt, and then finally to Ansible. Configuring servers declaratively is such a massive improvement over shell scripts. The fact that Ansible is agentless is also very nice and works very well for when you only have a handful of servers. Only thing I dislike is YML, which I think is yucky!

SkipperCat 5y ago
We took the same path, using config management tools to automate our deployments. But after a while, we realized that the servers only existed to run apps, and those apps could be declaratively described as containers and the whole thing pushed to Kubernetes. That was our 'perfect world'. Reality was different and we still have a lot of servers running stuff, but what we did push into K8s really reduced our operations workload and we're pretty happy about that.
ff317 5y ago
It's a leaky abstraction, though. The problem is that many systems people that were raised only on these abstractions lack the depth to understand what's under the hood when those other layers do unexpected things.
- NikolaeVarius 5y ago
  I dont think there is much abstraction about a apt get command and waiting for exit 0
jhickok 5y ago
Out of curiosity, have you tried tools like Pulumi? I've never used it but as a longtime Ansible user it's something that has my interest.
- MonaroVXR 5y ago
  Pulumi isn't for your own infrastructure, but for Cloud providers. I didn't search for a Cloud provider-less Pulumi/Terraform alternative yet.
harryruhr 5y ago
YML is the exact reason I don't use Ansible anymore. Writing complex YML for simple tasks is a time burner. After I discovered https://efs2.sh https://efs2.sh I switched over to this simple config management solution, which simply executes commands and scripts over ssh. It is so much simpler and faster (both in regards to creation and execution) than Ansible.

SkipperCat 5y ago

We took the same path, using config management tools to automate our deployments. But after a while, we realized that the servers only existed to run apps, and those apps could be declaratively described as containers and the whole thing pushed to Kubernetes. That was our 'perfect world'. Reality was different and we still have a lot of servers running stuff, but what we did push into K8s really reduced our operations workload and we're pretty happy about that.

ff317 5y ago

It's a leaky abstraction, though. The problem is that many systems people that were raised only on these abstractions lack the depth to understand what's under the hood when those other layers do unexpected things.

NikolaeVarius 5y ago
I dont think there is much abstraction about a apt get command and waiting for exit 0

jhickok 5y ago

Out of curiosity, have you tried tools like Pulumi? I've never used it but as a longtime Ansible user it's something that has my interest.

MonaroVXR 5y ago
Pulumi isn't for your own infrastructure, but for Cloud providers. I didn't search for a Cloud provider-less Pulumi/Terraform alternative yet.

harryruhr 5y ago

YML is the exact reason I don't use Ansible anymore. Writing complex YML for simple tasks is a time burner. After I discovered https://efs2.sh https://efs2.sh I switched over to this simple config management solution, which simply executes commands and scripts over ssh. It is so much simpler and faster (both in regards to creation and execution) than Ansible.