[lewaldman]

Mate... I manage hundreds of servers with it... including EKS Clusters lifecycles + creation of golden images, several databases stacks and AWS/Cloud provisioning.

It's far far far better than anything else... (specially Chef... It's light years ahead of Chef!)

[h1d]

Mind sharing a few examples of what's so better? Just curious.

[lewaldman]

Sure! =)

For the starter... It only needs one single component to work , my computer!

Puppet/Salt you need a master server (with HA, load balancing, etc...) and a client running on every machine.

This by it self already add an order of magnitude more complexity than using Ansible.

And for Chef... Oh boy... you need a master server, a client running on every node plus a client running on your computer! (really... for me this by itself is already more than enough reason for me to plain refuse working with Chef).

Now... putting this details aside, the way that I use Ansible allows me to use the dynamic inventory feature (so... I don't store actual infra state on the automation) and to create playbooks that act as DevOps helpers if you may...

So... let's say that I need to setup a MongoDB Replicaset... I just call the `playbooks/provision-mongodb-replicaset.yml` playbook with the needed parameters and... the playbook takes care of everything. From the EC2 provisioning till the Hard disks partitioning (up to the RAID setup) going over OS settings, security roles, apps installations, etc..., till it goes, install MongoDB and create the replicaset for me.

All this with a single command from my computer without the need of anything else! =P

(and I have this `provisions-` and `update-` playbooks for everything that we run on my current job + for the things that I set up when freelancing... Including AWS only stuff like VPCs, or OpenVPN + VPC + Peering + etc...)

[samvimes]

> All this with a single command from my computer without the need of anything else! =P

This is my primary problem with ansible. I find that it's been really great for managing things from my local machine, but that model breaks down a little once you have a medium / largish fleet of machines in some cloud provider's space. On top of that, if you have strict security boundaries between different environments/resources, then running ansible scripts that touch a ton of machines becomes more of an exercise in key management than anything else. I know that there are tools out there like AWX and rundeck, which wrap a lot of ansible functionality, but I've found the push model to be a little hard to manage at scale.

We're using ansible almost exclusively for config mgmt tasks, and I'd like to find a way to make it work better for us, but the agent model used by puppet/chef/salt sounds really appealing, especially when I want to role a change out to a large set of machines