[vidarh]

I've build setups like this with Ansible, but the more I use Ansible, the less likely it is that I'll consider it for future projects. I find it a lot less painful to write code to do these things directly than wrestle with Ansible. E.g. the amount of pain I went through before realising that the EC2 module at the time messed with whitespace in the user-data (great when you're transferring yaml... one more reason I detest significant whitespace; but the irony of this breaking in a tool written in Python was not lost on us), for example.

[gedrap]

I guess it depends on the use case. If all you want to do is to make sure that, for example, all web servers have the same version of nginx, php and sync the configs of these services, I think ansible is a great tool and writing code to do that would definitely qualify as 'reinventing the wheel'.

I wouldn't disqualify the tool for a problem in one of the modules either. Bugs happen :)