[tw04]

Free? I’m not sure if that’s a joke. Ansible licensing is about as far from free as you can get.

Having to hire someone to customize ansible is the exact opposite of what op asked for and just reaffirms my point: ansible does nothing without significant customization.

[andrecp11]

Ansible licensing? I must be missing something! Do you mean Ansible Tower? Ansible is free and OSS. It has AWX which is the Tower equivalent but free.

Yes. Ansible is a framework with plugins. Just like Django or Ruby on Rails.

[tw04]

What other ansible licensing would I be talking about? AWX has no support, it is a non-starter in the enterprise.

So again: Ansible is not an answer for someone looking for a ready-made solution to managing bare metal, which was my entire premise. Telling people to just use Ansible or Puppet when they're asking for a solution to the problem is just barely more helpful then telling them you can do it with a bash script and SSH for a consulting fee. It's pedantic and misses the point entirely.

[hnlmorg]

I've used Ansible to manage bare metal. It worked great. I've used Ansible in high availability enterprise environments. Again, it worked great.

I'm not as big of a fan of Puppet but actually puppet also works great for on-prem systems given that's what it was originally designed for. If anything, Puppet makes less sense in the cloud than it does on bare metal.

I'm not disputing you have a complex problem but that just means you need to spend a little more time tuning your solution (not less time like you seem to assume).

And if you want my advice about how to approach a daunting build: break your problem down. First start with delivering easy systems which will have the least impact if it goes wrong. This is to get your confidence up in working with the tool. Then start picking the harder targets that will give you the most reward, so even if your project ends up unfinished you've still fixed the biggest problems in your org. Then work your way backwards until everything is fixed. After a while, some of the easier deliveries will become background jobs you can fit in between support queries or half day sprint tickets (depending on whether you Kanban or Sprint). Before you know it, you'll have everything automated and realise it was far less painful than it appeared before you'd started the project.

Disclaimer: I'm DevOps Manager who has transitioned several orgs to through this process :)

[Karunamon]

AWX (and Tower) have a different use case than the base apps. And I think you'd be surprised how heavy it is in the enterprise. You don't need to pay thousands to get battle-tested tools.

[apple4ever]

You don't need to use Tower to use Ansible.

You can use Ansible to manage bare metal - I've done it at two different companies.

Trust me, it works great.

[notyourday]

> Having to hire someone to customize ansible is the exact opposite of what op asked for and just reaffirms my point: ansible does nothing without significant customization.

When you decide that your cattle is going to be pets and pets get individual care and feeding, you have to hire a lot of people to do the individual care and feeding.

I've done done management of ~2k Linux systems across 17 generations with Ansible. It is not a big deal. You enforce conventions so you no longer have 2k different servers but rather a feet of Betsys, a fleet of Franks, a dozen of Marshas and a couple of Jacks. And you do not touch the boot configuration because even in 2020 you do not need to touch the boot/network configuration.