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Regarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to be the best there is...

alecsm 3y ago
Why slow and complicated? We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.
- dontdoxxme 3y ago
  Ansible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow and automate it. The problem is it doesn’t go much beyond that, so you’re limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it’s a pain to parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or mitogen can help). However fundamentally you’re still SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind of agent on the machine (although ansible is a reasonable way to bootstrap something else).
  - dapf 3y ago
    [dead]
  - madcadmium 3y ago
    When I managed a large fleet of EC2 instances running CentOS I had Ansible running locally on each machine via a cron job. I only used remote SSH to orchestrate deployments (stop service, upgrade, test, put back in service).
  - alecsm 3y ago
    Well, that's exactly what we need. Our servers are growing in numbers and it's a pain in the ass the log into each one of them via SSH and do stuff.
- sureglymop 3y ago
  There is Mitogen [0] that helps a bit. Their website also kind of explain some of the issues: > Requiring minimal configuration changes, it updates Ansible’s slow and wasteful shell-centric implementation with pure-Python equivalents, invoked via highly efficient remote procedure calls to persistent interpreters tunnelled over SSH. No changes are required to target hosts. Then of course python itself is not very performant and yaml is quite the mess too. With ansible, you have global variables, group level variables that can override them, host level variables that can override those, role level variables, play/book level variables that can override those and ad-hoc level variables that can override all of the above. I am telling you, it can get incredibly messy and needlessly complicated quickly. As I said though, it's still the best we've got even if not optimal. So I think it's a good idea to implement it to at least have something. [0]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html
deadbunny 3y ago
Saltstack is IMO superior to Ansible. It uses ZMQ for command and control. You can write everything in python if you want but the default is YAML + JINJA2. And is desired state not procedural. Not used it for about 5 years and I think they got bought by VMWare IIRC. The only downside is that Ansible won the mindshare so you're gonna be more on your own when it comes to writing esoteric formulas.
mixmastamyk 3y ago
I wrote a tool similar to ansible in the old days. We both started about the same time, so wasn't really a goal to compete with it. Later I noticed they had some type of funding from Red Hat, which dulled my enthusiasm a bit. Then Docker/containers started hitting it big and I figured it would be the end of the niche and stopped. Interesting that folks are still using it, though I'm not sure of the market share.

alecsm 3y ago

Why slow and complicated? We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.

dontdoxxme 3y ago
Ansible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow and automate it. The problem is it doesn’t go much beyond that, so you’re limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it’s a pain to parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or mitogen can help). However fundamentally you’re still SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind of agent on the machine (although ansible is a reasonable way to bootstrap something else).
- dapf 3y ago
  [dead]
- madcadmium 3y ago
  When I managed a large fleet of EC2 instances running CentOS I had Ansible running locally on each machine via a cron job. I only used remote SSH to orchestrate deployments (stop service, upgrade, test, put back in service).
- alecsm 3y ago
  Well, that's exactly what we need. Our servers are growing in numbers and it's a pain in the ass the log into each one of them via SSH and do stuff.
sureglymop 3y ago
There is Mitogen [0] that helps a bit. Their website also kind of explain some of the issues: > Requiring minimal configuration changes, it updates Ansible’s slow and wasteful shell-centric implementation with pure-Python equivalents, invoked via highly efficient remote procedure calls to persistent interpreters tunnelled over SSH. No changes are required to target hosts. Then of course python itself is not very performant and yaml is quite the mess too. With ansible, you have global variables, group level variables that can override them, host level variables that can override those, role level variables, play/book level variables that can override those and ad-hoc level variables that can override all of the above. I am telling you, it can get incredibly messy and needlessly complicated quickly. As I said though, it's still the best we've got even if not optimal. So I think it's a good idea to implement it to at least have something. [0]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html

deadbunny 3y ago

Saltstack is IMO superior to Ansible. It uses ZMQ for command and control. You can write everything in python if you want but the default is YAML + JINJA2. And is desired state not procedural. Not used it for about 5 years and I think they got bought by VMWare IIRC. The only downside is that Ansible won the mindshare so you're gonna be more on your own when it comes to writing esoteric formulas.

mixmastamyk 3y ago

I wrote a tool similar to ansible in the old days. We both started about the same time, so wasn't really a goal to compete with it. Later I noticed they had some type of funding from Red Hat, which dulled my enthusiasm a bit. Then Docker/containers started hitting it big and I figured it would be the end of the niche and stopped. Interesting that folks are still using it, though I'm not sure of the market share.