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by mjolk 3904 days ago
>An agentless setup is ideal iff you have an effective method of service discovery and strongly consistent data storage.

Sure, or use tag and/or have AWS (aws can be used as a node classifier).

>It's significantly worse than "if (var) { block }", though, yeah? I mean, yes, it works, but I think that having a programming language with conventionally understood data structures and functions

I'm not sure what you mean -- it's YAML + Jinja2. It's just powerful enough that you can hand it off to an Ops team and they can get stuff done.

>I mean--I'm a programmer. Programming things is easier for me than maintaining YAML files. =)

Agreed. I actually hit a point that I said "fuck this" and almost just wrote chunks of python to stitch together with jinja includes, then base64, send and run. I didn't because with Ansible, I can just point others at a doc that I don't maintain (not to say the docs aren't garbage).

>(though Berks tends to be helpful anyway)

Ha -- petty, but I hate the amount of memes like "berkshelf" in the Ruby/Chef toolchain. "berks" is enough to make me involuntarily scoff.

>All that said, I'm not saying you shouldn't use Ansible, and I dig that you have some perspective about it. Just offering a different point of view. =)

Didn't take it that way :) I spent over a year with Chef+agent/Chef-zero/Chef-solo, about a year with Puppet, before using Ansible. I find that Ansible "just goes away" with less effort and doesn't just grow until it eats your entire ops team.