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Ansible: I was in the "Don't go there" camp a while ago - they documentation was horrible, the whole website a mess and lots of things weren't discoverable at a

Ansible: I was in the "Don't go there" camp a while ago - they documentation was horrible, the whole website a mess and lots of things weren't discoverable at all (people using ansible told me that they used google site search to find stuff in the manual). I returned a couple of days ago to look at the current state of things and I have to admit that I was impressed. Technically I really liked ansible for quite some while. Now it even comes with decent documentation. I'd back the suggestion to check it out.

ghayes 13y ago
I was really excited by ansible, but I quickly found out that using `register: result` and `when: result|success` throughout so many playbooks meant I was back to the mess that is understanding the flow of a chef script that you didn't personally write. Maybe that's not a problem since I rarely found an open source ansible playbook for anything I needed and had to always write my own.
- zenojevski 13y ago
  Hi, I've published some reusable roles for ansible. They are still quite basic, but I'd love for you to have a look at them. https://github.com/search?q=%40zenoamaro+ansible https://github.com/search?q=%40zenoamaro+ansible
  - ghayes 13y ago
    Always great to see people putting up open-source projects like this. I'll definitely give them a look, and at the least, get a grip on how other people found solutions with Ansible. Thanks man.
mercurial 13y ago
The doc is indeed pretty good, and available offline (ansible-doc). I quite like that it uses a very declarative syntax, and it's relatively easy to get idempotent operations. And the fact that you don't need to install anything on the machine you administer is definitely a strong point. One downside is that I can see how tracking down role dependencies would be tricky if you had many different roles. I also haven't tried at scale.

ghayes 13y ago

I was really excited by ansible, but I quickly found out that using `register: result` and `when: result|success` throughout so many playbooks meant I was back to the mess that is understanding the flow of a chef script that you didn't personally write. Maybe that's not a problem since I rarely found an open source ansible playbook for anything I needed and had to always write my own.

zenojevski 13y ago
Hi, I've published some reusable roles for ansible. They are still quite basic, but I'd love for you to have a look at them. https://github.com/search?q=%40zenoamaro+ansible https://github.com/search?q=%40zenoamaro+ansible
- ghayes 13y ago
  Always great to see people putting up open-source projects like this. I'll definitely give them a look, and at the least, get a grip on how other people found solutions with Ansible. Thanks man.

mercurial 13y ago

The doc is indeed pretty good, and available offline (ansible-doc). I quite like that it uses a very declarative syntax, and it's relatively easy to get idempotent operations. And the fact that you don't need to install anything on the machine you administer is definitely a strong point. One downside is that I can see how tracking down role dependencies would be tricky if you had many different roles. I also haven't tried at scale.