[jake_morrison]

Ansible is still the best for tactical automation tasks. The syntax is also approachable for people who don't use it often, e.g. developers.

Ansible has poor performance on larger tasks. Idempotency checks to see whether an action needs to be executed require manual work to set up and time to execute. This also makes it slow to work with cloud resources.

I switched to Terraform years ago for low-level resource provisioning and cloud automation. I still occasionally use it in conjunction with Packer to create AMIs.

The shift to containerized application deployment makes Ansible much less relevant in general.

Dockerfiles are bad at idempotency, but the solution is probably not Ansible.

[geerlingguy]

Definitely a fair take; I think Ansible still has a place in containerized environments, but the nice thing is it can play a large or small role depending on how much you want to learn other tools which might be better at a specific automation segment (like Terraform for infra resources).

[jake_morrison]

Thanks for your service supporting the Ansible community. Your books are also great, and I highly recommend them to anyone learning Ansible.