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What I've watched and read, mostly from ansible.com, but also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible, suggests that Ansible
by dj-wonk 12y ago
What I've watched and read, mostly from ansible.com, but also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible, suggests that Ansible is idempotent. What should I read that makes the opposite claim?
- gecko 12y agoThat's unfortunate. The presence of the command module alone ought to make it clear that's not true. I think Ansible aims to be more idempotenty than other environments, and I think it succeeds there. The lack of something like Chef databags helps, as does its insistence that $SCM is the source of truth. But it doesn't take a holistic enough stance to really get all the way there. It's very difficult to do things like handle the transition from one version of a play book to another sometimes; while running a given playbook on a given blank system may be idempotent, it can't actually reliably model state transitions. In other words, it's only got half of the puzzle.
- crdoconnor 12y agoIt aims to be idempotent, but the presence of things like the cmd module allows you to hack it in such a way that it isn't. This is why I don't use cmd in general, and if I do I try to make sure that it's an idempotent command.