[unixsheikh]

No. It adds nothing but unneeded complexity to the stack. Learn how to package your software and use the package manager. You can combine that, if you must, with any kind of config manager like Ansible or something else.

So many companies are doing what's "trendy and shiny", and it can almost look like it is becoming a de-facto standard, but they will eventually realize the mistake.

[mohanmcgeek]

Learning ansible in 2022 would be what's a waste of effort as every company that I know is phasing it out in favour of immutable infrastructure via OCI images.

It's been 7 years. Kubernetes isn't trendy or shiny. The teams using it use it because of legitimate reasons.

[sshine]

Ansible is not a waste of time. It's a tool for a certain set of tasks.

I learned Ansible in 2021 after mainly having used Kubernetes, Helm and Terraform at work.

I did that because I needed to deploy self-hosted Kubernetes nodes, virtual machines and VPNs; while there are Terraform providers (drivers) for open-source hypervisors, you still need to get your OS from vanilla to installed-and-configured. Ansible does that.

And yes, you could build install images and deploy them directly on your hardware. But with certain non-cloud datacenters, the pick-your-image option is sometimes limited. Being able to pick some preferred vanilla image and run the same commands to get the same node up and running is just so easy to experiment with, and it works even before your image registry server is up and running.

[BossingAround]

I'm not sure how you can replace your infrastructure with an OCI image, provided that OCI image means a container image?

I don't think Ansible is a waste of effort. For example, we have OpenStack images that we spawn, but use Ansible to have repeatable builds of those images. Additionally, you can learn enough Ansible in a weekend to be dangerous. IMO the payoff is there, it's a very simple yet effective framework, depending on your usecases.