| HN Mirror

I can see benefits of something like ansible if you have a command-and-control environment where you deploy 300 machines from a central database. Still allows you destroy 300 machines in one single misconfiguration or mishandled error though, ouch. If you have a federated environment where you have many actors all managing their own machines though I don't see the point.

The number of times I have to do something to the 160 machines I'm responsible for is about 3 times a year. Clusterssh does the job in 10 minutes, and inevitably shines a light on some unexpected error somewhere. If I was doing it on a weekly basis though, using ansible would be beneficial.

Personally I don't like ansible's way of throwing everything in a file in /tmp, then running it as root. authlog gets sent to my central syslogs servers so I've got a record of what happened. With ansible I'm never quite sure, and I'd have to look in two different places for logs.

Instead we just have a lightweight phone home agent which reports processes/diskspace/mounts/interfaces/hostname/ownership etc so you can identify who owns a device on your network and what it's responsible for without consulting out of date documentation that relies on humans to do things.

Kubernetes I guess is useful if you're building a cluster of 100 machines scaling and doing the same service because you're handling a million users a day. Most companies don't do that, most services don't need that.

Use the right tool for the right job, and don't assume the stuff google use is the right tool (unless you're building a lab because you want experience to get a job working for google. If you tried that shit on my network you'd be starting your job search far earlier)