I hate anything that uses python or depends on whitespace in it’s code. Nothing but fucking problems. You know what’s hard to see an extra space in a line of code. A missing semicolon is so much easier to find.
i keep telling myself what a timesaver ansible is, while at the same time my simple scripts got abstracted and puzzled into more files, much harder to quickly read and understand them and after hours of frustration, ansible actually works. there may be multiple minutes of delay between my tasks wasting time like hell but it works. except when it doesn’t. there still is a playbook where the host cannot be reached and i keep on failing to understand why as everything appears to be the same and looks correct. there will be more hours wasted.
Last time I checked on ansible, it was a sysadmin complaining that he could just do everything better with vanilla bash scripts and that redhat keeps riding it because every company keeps asking for ansible experience, even if it’s now a dated product.
And just personally, declarative anything seems to defeat it’s own purpose any time you want to do something non standard, which comes up more often than you’d think.
You forgot that it can run without ssh set up, by installing ansible on the machines and letting them poll for changes.
uses vanilla ssh
Clearly you haven’t tried automation of network devices because it constantly bitches about missing ansible-pylibssh and falls back to Paramiko
I love this meme format!
THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I’M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!
I have to say, the resurgence of this energy in the last whenever has been refreshing. Can’t we all just crank our hogs?
Honestly, fuck Ansible.
It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.
It’s YAML is awful, it scales terribly, it’s so fucking slow at literally everything, it gives people who have no clue what they’re doing a false sense of confidence.
The number of times I’ve seen app teams waste the time of support groups and engineers because something went wrong and they didn’t have the knowledge to know why and need to waste so many man hours having other people solve it for them. I (the engineer) was added to a chat that had 15 people in it because they, after running ansible, saw errors in their server… So clearly there was a problem with the server… At no point did they question there Ansible job.
Of the various tools I’ve used, I prefer Salt. The YAML is slightly less ass and it’s so much faster while also seeming to scaling better too. It by no means is perfect.
You had me at “fuck Ansible”.
Honestly, fuck Ansible.
It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.
It’s actually on par with 20-year-old tech. There’s nothing it’s doing that we weren’t doing back then already in the enterprise space. And, in so many cases where Ansible’s unable to respond well to changes to the system, it ends up not being on par with 20-yer-old tech.
Salt is better as it’s one generation newer, aka last-gen. Puppet, salt, chef/cinc, all the same generation, and we get single source of truth and fast operation de
Current-gen is mgmtconfig, and from it we get instant/constant converging event-driven code. If you like ansible, you’re gonna love sale or cinc. If you love salt or puppet, mgmtconfig will blow your mind clean out the back of your head.
100 servers? 5000? Ansible don’t care
Sub-second convergence of thousands of servers. Files managed so hard you can’t manually mod them as they revert immediately and it’s an actual race to try and mod a file to use it, since it’s hooked into inotify and friends.
James even put in a YAML-ish DSL for the crayola crew who haven’t learned Go yet. :-P
I also appreciate the alternative suggestion. No terraform love?
No terraform love
Terraform 0.12 was awesome. It had no supply-chain sploit risk, ran well, accepted add-ons easily, and was very powerful.
Then they got a registry for people to attack, an umbilical to operation that ubisoft would envy.
I’ve been unable to get anything newer approved so far, because of the risk . Sure, you firewall off the box running CI, but often it needs to get out to the world, and suddenly it’s a WAF on top of everything, and it’s a real mess … which they can eliminate by killing terraform usage altogether. And I don’t wanna see that, as while tf’s dsl is pretty weird it’s the least-worst tool out there.
Terraform and Ansible do different things, they do have overlapping features, but ultimately they’re Kent to do different things. I use them both at my current job with Terraform running Ansible
Thanks for including an alternative you’d recommend!
Well you will be happy to hear that it’s owned by Broadcom now. While salt is better, I wouldn’t use it just because of Broadcom.
But then again, Oracle now owns Redhat, so…
IBM owns Red Hat.
Oops yeah. Not sure why I was thinking Oracle
Wtf is SSH and why should I care?
SSH is a network protocol for making secure connections, allowing remote access to various systems. As for why you should care, if you didn’t know what SSH was, then you probably shouldn’t care since you aren’t the target audience. It’s fringe knowledge for me too.
Hello? Its me, NixOS.
After a suspicious-looking guide I nearly started with, and the NoxOS split drama, and having homemanager bork my login in a test setup, I wonder if next time I’ll try GUIX.
Yeah, guix started as a nix fork with scheme, we all dancing at the same party.
NixOS : no dudes, its not raw screeching madness, its great. Just great. So great. Please read these 17 guides that are outdated more every minute to get started. Also, dont read that guide. We don’t do that anymore, but there is no way for me to explain why unless you already know.
Ive tried NixOS three times now, and it hasn’t took. Has anyone written a sane guide to the current iteration yet?
Listen. The more painful it is up front, the better you’ll feel once you get it.
This is the argument I use to convince straight guys to let me bum them
Just so you know.
Ahh, I didn’t realize we had mixed some “git gud” dark souls shit into my devops.
But seriously, I’ll give your guide a look. Everyone should taste madness occasionally.
I mean… You liked dark souls, right?
Once nix clicks, you’ll know the massive missed potential that ansible is (being just another abstraction layer, and not baked into the package manager itself) and you’ll never look at ansible the same way again.
Sure, but that doesnt mean I want to mix its difficulty into code.
I like fried chicken too, but i don’t try to somehow add json to it, no matter how sexy those nested brackets get.
Good things dont all have to be sluiced together into a juicy pulp. They can be good all on their lonesome. I can “git gud” in dark souls and enjoy well documented, consistent IaC as well.
Are you mixing metaphors or enjoying fried chicken in unconventional ways?
“Keep it simple” says the project that decided it would be great to program in YAML…
I’ve tried using it to manage a few home servers and parameterizing anything was painful and boilerplate-ridden
Except it isn’t actually YAML you’re writing, it’s a jinja2 string template that parses to YAML because the expressions they came up with ended up not being sufficient.
Mm, I love stacking weird formats. How many backslashes do I need for a regular expression to work right? 🥵
Jist wait until you have to start fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python for different targets.
fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python
They’re being treated for PTSD in solaris-land.
Yeah. I said solaris.
Because group or host vars are hard?
No. Because the python version of the host and the target server must loosely match up. Otherwise you get some cryptic error messages in some unexpected modules. Red Hat’s solution: just manage RHEL 9 targets from RHEL9 hosts and RHEL8 from RHEL8 hosts. There is no official way to align python versions across that major.
I’ve been using Ansible for almost 10 years now and one thing I learned is to keep things simple, most issues I had with Ansible in the past were due to me taking the wrong approach to problem solving. In way, it forced me to not overcomplicate things.
I’m not the biggest fan of it, but I do prefer it over other IaCs.
edit: tbh my biggest issue with Ansible is other people who ask me “why not wrtie a bash script instead?”
Finally, KISS enforced software
I finally understand Ansible.
WASTHATSOFUCKINGHARD?!?!!
Anyone that says yaml is readable is psychotic. It’s literally objectively not readable because a random white space character can break the entire thing and that’s by definition not readable I can’t see whether there’s a white space or not without explicitly setting that up in an editor
That’s what ansible-lint is for.
I mean sure or you could just start by using a format that’s not so painfully strict with how it’s laid out. I miss the good old INI config. It couldn’t give two shits how you format it, throw in random spaces random tabs random new lines so long as the value was correct
I hate ini. Lists stuck in ini.
The scandinavian country codes, as understood by yaml:
- se
- false
- dk
Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.
“Broke backwards compatibility”
Brother, what do you think versioning is for?
Ow! My semver.
Also completely parses your whole goddamn secrets file multiple times per run, so if you need to change a single server, make sure you have time.
