[wiremine]

I've been using Ansible for a few production-related tasks lately, and think it's great. It provides the right level of abstraction, IMHO: you can crack open a playbook, read through it, and know exactly what it is doing. There's also a growing number of playbooks if you google around.

That said, the biggest downside I've seen with Ansible is reusable components. They have something called Galaxy in beta [1], which should help, although it feels a bit rough yet...

[1] https://galaxy.ansible.com/

[geerlingguy]

Galaxy is slowly, but surely, becoming a more helpful tool. At this point, I think most people are using ad-hoc playbooks and homegrown roles. I think more people will start using (and improving) Galaxy roles as the tool becomes more mature (most of the glaring bugs are gone in Ansible 1.6, which is coming soon), and more roles are added/shared.

It's nice being able to put together a plethora of servers within seconds, and start deploying them to DO, AWS, or a local box for playing around within a few minutes! See, for example: https://github.com/geerlingguy/ansible-vagrant-examples

[crdoconnor]

>That said, the biggest downside I've seen with Ansible is reusable components

This was a major, major issue with puppet, too - although somewhat worse, in that the manifests were more unreadable.

One issue that ansible still hasn't really solved is the horrible if/then/elses you have to put in to accommodate RHEL/ubuntu/centos/whatever else differences.

I like that galaxy at least lets you specify which environment the playbook will run on, though.

[mpdehaan2]

Check out the group_by module, as this can make those totally go away.

[fit2rule]

Was quite surprised to see a lack of playbooks in Galaxy that have anything to do with installing/setting up the Java RE .. anyone know any reason why that may be the case?