3 ms·

the thing that keeps me away from ansible is the pricing model. I find 100$/year/server way too much. and nobody can ensure me that the OSS version is all I'll

the thing that keeps me away from ansible is the pricing model. I find 100$/year/server way too much. and nobody can ensure me that the OSS version is all I'll always need.

andrewflnr 13y ago
I find this a curious objection. Would you still have hesitated when, as was the case until very recently, there was only the OSS version?
- drsintoma 13y ago
  Probably I wouldn't have. I now they have to monetize the product, and for a software with simplicity as the strongest selling point, doing it through consulting/support I guess would be a conflict of interests. But when I saw the prices I was a bit shocked, and made me doubt about the company's strategy in the long term.
  - mpdehaan2 13y ago
    Hey guys, I'd suggest you look at some competitors for pricing and come back with me, they aren't really that different. We're not going to be holding back on anything in Ansible, in fact, we're seeing several hundred contributors each month and are adding an average of 20 new modules to core each release. This release also adds role dependencies and lots of nice new performance features. For those looking for better solutions to things from proprietary software vendors, this provides a lot of options. If you're looking to not need those kind of features, Ansible is still there. One thing we're not going to do is keep making Ansible more and more complicated over time -- there's a major focus on keeping it simple. When I started this project I said "if I can make a consultancy out of this I'm doing it wrong" :) Actually being a company is good for us -- it allows us to hire extra people to work on Ansible, and it's allowing us to do more for the community not less!
Argorak 13y ago
Thats quite interesting. A somewhat potent piece of hardware with basic administration and on-call-service can cost you ~200$ a month (Thats an EC2 large instance with one hour of an reasonably competent sysadmin). Thats ~2400$ a year. In the light of those numbers, I find 100$/year for a tool that eases your work with those expensive beasts reasonable.
gexla 13y ago
That pricing model isn't for Ansible. Ansible is open source and free to use. The pricing model you are referring to is for Ansible AWX, the web based UI for Ansible. This app isn't open source. There are no separate versions of Ansible such as what Nginx has done. Ansible AWX adds no further functionality to Ansible except for the UI.
- mpdehaan2 13y ago
  Well that's not exactly the case (not just a UI). It adds role based access control, centralized logging of what all your playbooks have done, and a way to keep up with the history of your hosts over time. Yes, there's definitely a focus on making things push button, but one of the major ideas here is that I can easily delegate roles to particular members of my team -- lab staff might be able to work with inventory, QA might be able to deploy to the test environment, ops may be able to deploy to production, etc. This is just our first release but the main goal here is to make the absolutely simplest/best ops tool for teams we can make. If people have ideas, definitely pass info along (info@ansibleworks.com). It would be greatly appreciated! The next release comes out in about a week and adds some extra bonus features on top as well.
bdunbar 13y ago
We're managing fifty hosts and applications under Ansible, due to treble by 2014 Q2. So far, I see no need to use AWX. I can't ensure you of anything but why not install it in a test instance and give it a try?
mpdehaan2 13y ago
Yep, this pricing is just for the enterprise product. It adds a lot of things on top companies may want but most direct users of the open source app do not -- things like role based access control and a really rich REST API for customization and plugging into the orchestration engine, history of events, etc. It also includes support -- which is not just asking for bugs, but also us helping provide advice on how to manage your infrastructure. You should find pricing pretty well in line with some of the competing solutions. If you have questions about pricing not fitting your usage model, definitely contact us for details and we can work with you.
lreeves 13y ago
How does that model work with AWS, where many people are creating and destroying VMs in scaling groups?

the thing that keeps me away from ansible is the pricing model. I find 100$/year/server way too much. and nobody can ensure me that the OSS version is all I'll always need.

andrewflnr 13y ago

I find this a curious objection. Would you still have hesitated when, as was the case until very recently, there was only the OSS version?

drsintoma 13y ago
Probably I wouldn't have. I now they have to monetize the product, and for a software with simplicity as the strongest selling point, doing it through consulting/support I guess would be a conflict of interests. But when I saw the prices I was a bit shocked, and made me doubt about the company's strategy in the long term.
- mpdehaan2 13y ago
  Hey guys, I'd suggest you look at some competitors for pricing and come back with me, they aren't really that different. We're not going to be holding back on anything in Ansible, in fact, we're seeing several hundred contributors each month and are adding an average of 20 new modules to core each release. This release also adds role dependencies and lots of nice new performance features. For those looking for better solutions to things from proprietary software vendors, this provides a lot of options. If you're looking to not need those kind of features, Ansible is still there. One thing we're not going to do is keep making Ansible more and more complicated over time -- there's a major focus on keeping it simple. When I started this project I said "if I can make a consultancy out of this I'm doing it wrong" :) Actually being a company is good for us -- it allows us to hire extra people to work on Ansible, and it's allowing us to do more for the community not less!

Argorak 13y ago

Thats quite interesting. A somewhat potent piece of hardware with basic administration and on-call-service can cost you ~200$ a month (Thats an EC2 large instance with one hour of an reasonably competent sysadmin). Thats ~2400$ a year. In the light of those numbers, I find 100$/year for a tool that eases your work with those expensive beasts reasonable.

gexla 13y ago

That pricing model isn't for Ansible. Ansible is open source and free to use. The pricing model you are referring to is for Ansible AWX, the web based UI for Ansible. This app isn't open source. There are no separate versions of Ansible such as what Nginx has done. Ansible AWX adds no further functionality to Ansible except for the UI.

mpdehaan2 13y ago
Well that's not exactly the case (not just a UI). It adds role based access control, centralized logging of what all your playbooks have done, and a way to keep up with the history of your hosts over time. Yes, there's definitely a focus on making things push button, but one of the major ideas here is that I can easily delegate roles to particular members of my team -- lab staff might be able to work with inventory, QA might be able to deploy to the test environment, ops may be able to deploy to production, etc. This is just our first release but the main goal here is to make the absolutely simplest/best ops tool for teams we can make. If people have ideas, definitely pass info along (info@ansibleworks.com). It would be greatly appreciated! The next release comes out in about a week and adds some extra bonus features on top as well.

bdunbar 13y ago

We're managing fifty hosts and applications under Ansible, due to treble by 2014 Q2. So far, I see no need to use AWX. I can't ensure you of anything but why not install it in a test instance and give it a try?

mpdehaan2 13y ago

Yep, this pricing is just for the enterprise product. It adds a lot of things on top companies may want but most direct users of the open source app do not -- things like role based access control and a really rich REST API for customization and plugging into the orchestration engine, history of events, etc. It also includes support -- which is not just asking for bugs, but also us helping provide advice on how to manage your infrastructure. You should find pricing pretty well in line with some of the competing solutions. If you have questions about pricing not fitting your usage model, definitely contact us for details and we can work with you.

lreeves 13y ago

How does that model work with AWS, where many people are creating and destroying VMs in scaling groups?