[UI_at_80x24]

I want to love it more then I do. I think it doesn't fit my needs quite enough. When setting up a new system for a LAMP role, it might save me 5 minutes of work. When upgrading/updating my herd of LAMP servers, it might save me 5 minutes, and general 'management' of 50+ LAMP servers all in different AWS regions it's very handy. I like it. I just don't use it often enough to justify it.

I honestly spend more time getting it setup, testing, and deploying then I do using it. In my heart I know that this is the right approach, and the way I should be managing my servers. But the time-saved just isn't there. The consistency is awesome.

I have 2 complaints about Ansible. (1) Minor annoyance - It's slow. It's as slow as if I were sending individual commands from SSH. A scripted solution that is as slow as my typing is a hard sell. It doesn't make spelling mistakes but it does make different mistakes. I can live with this annoyance, but I have literally spun up a new server, SSH'd in, created my Ansible user, and launched my "Initial Server deployment script", went for lunch; and came back to it just finishing.

That example is even excusable. But a simple script: "check for system updates & report back if needed" for 50 servers is slow as fuck. Running them in parallel would be better.

My biggest most scornful vehement hatred is for yml files and python being white-space sensitive. I will piss on the shoes of the person that ever thought of that. Fuck them. Even though I have vim templates for .yml, Even though I have 'turn tabs to spaces', even though I have whitespace characters SHOWN; There is ALWAYS atleast one someplace.

I hold a hatred that only Khaan can feel towards Kirk about this.

But other then that, I really want to love it.

[yawaramin]

> Running them in parallel would be better.

It does run in parallel by default though: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks...

[Jedd]

Your first concern is addressed by saltstack - they chose an agent based approach, with client subscription, as the default, which makes for a significantly faster experience.

They subsequently offered an ssh-based option for those that wanted the poor performance of Ansible across larger fleets, or where agents were not palatable.

Unfortunately it doesn't address your second concern, as it also uses yml + jinja.

[takeda]

I wish saltstack would be more popular. It's so far the best one I used (I didn't use Puppet and CFEngine).

As for the second concern, you actually kind of can:

https://docs.saltproject.io/en/latest/ref/renderers/

yaml never bothered me, so I just used it, but you could use a different one. I suppose none of the ones from the list would make parent poster happy, but then one could write own renderer.

[takeda]

Came too late, so can't edit anymore, but here's an example of a custom renderer, that allows writing states using java properties format: https://github.com/saltstack/salt-contrib/blob/master/render...

[Jedd]

I agree - Saltstack felt like a significantly superior design, but alas the RHEL effect won out.

[secondcoming]

> My biggest most scornful vehement hatred is for yml files and python being white-space sensitive. I will piss on the shoes of the person that ever thought of that. Fuck them.

Amen. The irony of making something invisible syntactically significant is quite something.

[zmmmmm]

thanks - its really helpful to hear the warts-and-all version of experience like this. Appreciated!