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You can honestly do a lot of what people do with Terraform now just using Docker and Ansible. I'm surprised more people don't try to. Most clouds are supported,

You can honestly do a lot of what people do with Terraform now just using Docker and Ansible. I'm surprised more people don't try to. Most clouds are supported, even private clouds and stuff like MAAS.

x3n0ph3n3 8mo ago
Yeah, but ansible is one of the nine circles of hell and its support for various AWS services beyond EC2 and S3 is near nonexistant.
- Tostino 8mo ago
  I have mixed feelings about it. On my first startup, I used ansible to automate all of the manual workflows and server setup that we had done. Everything was just completely manual and in people's heads before, and translating it to ansible was a pain in the ass to say the least. I don't think it would have been any easier to translate it to something else though. It ended up working fine and we had a solid system that I could reset up our environment from scratch on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts. We were originally on digitalocean, and had to migrate to Azure because of acquisition BS. For my current startup I ended up not going a direction where I needed ansible. I've now got everything in helm charts and deployable to K8S clusters, and packaged with Dockerfiles. Not really missing ansible, but not exactly in love with K8S either. It works well enough I guess.
  - SkiFire13 8mo ago
    > on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts You ended up needing Terraform too for the infrastructure though. At that point why not just use Terraform?
    - Tostino 8mo ago
      Terraform was just for interacting with the cloud provider and spinning up the servers. Ansible was responsible for deploying all dependencies and getting the servers actually ready for use. Remember, none of this architecture was dockerized. I had originally used Ansible to interact with the cloud provider and do the provisioning too, but someone on the corporate infrastructure team wanted to use terraform for that instead, so they did the migration.
      - easterncalculus 8mo ago
        I also have experience with using Terraform and Ansible like this. Once I realized that most of the work actually performing the setup beyond blank VM creation was in Ansible, I was much more interested in just using Ansible for everything.

x3n0ph3n3 8mo ago

Yeah, but ansible is one of the nine circles of hell and its support for various AWS services beyond EC2 and S3 is near nonexistant.

Tostino 8mo ago
I have mixed feelings about it. On my first startup, I used ansible to automate all of the manual workflows and server setup that we had done. Everything was just completely manual and in people's heads before, and translating it to ansible was a pain in the ass to say the least. I don't think it would have been any easier to translate it to something else though. It ended up working fine and we had a solid system that I could reset up our environment from scratch on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts. We were originally on digitalocean, and had to migrate to Azure because of acquisition BS. For my current startup I ended up not going a direction where I needed ansible. I've now got everything in helm charts and deployable to K8S clusters, and packaged with Dockerfiles. Not really missing ansible, but not exactly in love with K8S either. It works well enough I guess.
- SkiFire13 8mo ago
  > on a set of VPS provided by some terraform scripts You ended up needing Terraform too for the infrastructure though. At that point why not just use Terraform?
  - Tostino 8mo ago
    Terraform was just for interacting with the cloud provider and spinning up the servers. Ansible was responsible for deploying all dependencies and getting the servers actually ready for use. Remember, none of this architecture was dockerized. I had originally used Ansible to interact with the cloud provider and do the provisioning too, but someone on the corporate infrastructure team wanted to use terraform for that instead, so they did the migration.
    - easterncalculus 8mo ago
      I also have experience with using Terraform and Ansible like this. Once I realized that most of the work actually performing the setup beyond blank VM creation was in Ansible, I was much more interested in just using Ansible for everything.