[FatalBaboon]

Like many here, I keep it described in ansible and documentation inside a git repository.

But I feel like it's lacking. After a while you have so many ansible playbooks and roles that they cannot give you a birds-eye view anymore.

I think I would MUCH prefer to have some sort of HTML representation, where adding an instance/service starts by adding to that representation, and you could click on every link or node to show its golden image setup, ansible configuration, etc.

THAT, I could show to a newcomer and he'd get it.

[linsomniac]

We are using Rundeck to get that. I spent a year or more basically being the only one in the company who could do Ansible runs, for various reasons, and Rundeck is the web UI we ended up setting up for the other part-time ops people and devs to use. I also looked at stackstorm, but it's free version didn't have user accounts which made it a non-starter for me. Plus, you really only interacted with it via chat, not a web page.

[petepete]

I'm no expert but doesn't Ansible Tower do that?

[FatalBaboon]

Ansible Tower lets you execute a playbook via a web GUI, and keeps a log of who executed what.

I'm not sure if it also shows some infrastructure graphs, but I'm talking about knowing if links are up, how they are firewalled, where the config for each thing is, etc.

When you host tens of services on hundreds of machines, this information is hard to get a grasp on, no matter what you do or how well you documented everything, because it takes a while to read through it.