I had to build bespoke orchestration and access layers. The gulf between "parallel ssh and a bunch of bash scripts" and "Ansible/Salt/etc" is a huge one. I wr

I had to build bespoke orchestration and access layers. The gulf between "parallel ssh and a bunch of bash scripts" and "Ansible/Salt/etc" is a huge one. I wrote an access layer framework that abstracts cli command delivery to nodes, has a configuration layer where env / cluster / datacenter / rack / individual node configuration settings can be applied in a cascading/overriding fashion. I use this to do adhoc stuff (using the groovy shell) as well as write backup and restore and other automation programs. They can run from the IDE and be debugged, they can run from CLI. I have a crude directory tree organized "workflowish" organization to spawning cassandra, kafka, zookeeper, elasticsearch, etc clusters and tearing them down. It works better than parallel. ssh and bash scripts by far, but I'm the only one that knows it. Is it "better" than just using Ansible or Salt or Kubernetes? Uh... don't know. Ansible got thrown out as messy (it became a massive monorepo). Our stateless servers haven't even fully jumped to k8s. Salt has too many servers. I'll try to open source it, but I doubt it will get traction. It will be useful for certain operations in Cassandra / Kafka / etc in that it is framework agnostic and isn't trying to take over the world, so we'll see.