[rajaravivarma_r]

This is great. We tried ansible and gave up as it was difficult to keep configuration DRY and annoying to create conditions with no control structure.

It was before ansible 2, so probably things are better now.

Then we started using Python fabric. Wow it was so freeing. Any helper methods were easily extracted and writing conditions felt natural.

Now I am using Python invoke to maintain my local setup.

[bityard]

I gave up being religiously DRY in Ansible playbooks early on. It's much easier to open a file and read through a list of simple 2- or 3-line tasks that execute sequentially, than it is to chase down a bunch of imports.

Same as in programming, over-adherence to DRY leads to spaghetti code.

[rajaravivarma_r]

I have tried this path of not trying to DRY everything, but has regretted and refactored to a more DRY approach eventually. The cost of remembering to fix/alter the logic everywhere is more than trying to keep it DRY. More often a method or a module is enough, nothing fancy.

The only place where I have accepted that DRY is not worth it is, unit tests. I used to extract any common behavior in a shared test, but each object will eventually evolve in its own way that the effort to make it DRY will be useless.

[Izmaki]

Ansible is strong when done right. Check out the tutorial series by Jeff Geerling on YouTube, he's amazing.

[rajaravivarma_r]

May be, but moving to Python did not take anything away. It brought more joy that you have more control over things like, on which server to run the migration and choose UAT or prod and just a list of servers specified in the command line.

And organizing the modules was straight forward as we already knew/did that in the project.

Perhaps, it comes from my programming background, but its true.