[zwischenzug]

"Everything I try to do in Ansible seems to turn into a shell script"

This was my disappointment with Ansible (and other CM tools) - so why not treat the shell as the basic unit of action? See my post elsewhere on this page for more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8135823

[mpdehaan2]

This doesn't have to be the case.

All resources in Ansible are declarative models of state, that get informed, and have idempotent properties.

So it's just like any CMS.

However if you want to write a deployment script, it also lets you, rather than fighting it kicking and screaming :)

Also, when you want to just push and run a script versus using one of the 234 other modules, it's there - http://docs.ansible.com/script_module.html

[zwischenzug]

I don't see the point of managing state at all. If it's stateful you're doing it wrong, and likely deploying it wrong too.

And if that's the case I don't see the point of a level of indirection outside the shell script. But that might be just me :)

I talk a bit more about this here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVUPmmUU3yY

but it's quite heavily edited and a little out of date.

[contingencies]

This comment is disturbing because it assumes there is a wrong way to do things. In fact, the point of managing state is to react to the changing state of different resources (ie. services in a service-oriented architecture, the physical or virtual systems they run on, the networks that connect them, etc.) and to automatically resolve failures through known and tested state-migrations. If you missed that, you're in no position to be calling people wrong. Further, anyone wrapping bash in python and calling it elegant is insane.

[zwischenzug]

"In fact, the point of managing state is to react to the changing state of different resources (ie. services in a service-oriented architecture, the physical or virtual systems they run on, the networks that connect them, etc.) and to automatically resolve failures through known and tested state-migrations."

They should be part of the definition of your system (ie the state), not changed on the fly.

If I said ShutIt was elegant, I was wrong (not sure where I did). It's not elegant, just as the real world is not.

Anyone trying to make config management look elegant is selling you a pup.

[shiven]

However if you want to write a deployment script, it also lets you, rather than fighting it kicking and screaming :)

A thousand times this! I, personally, find YAML easier to grok than whatever Puppet was using (see, post-puppet PTSD selective amnesia). And, anything that doesn't work, on a deadline, can be shell scripted now and modularized later.

[zwischenzug]

"can be shell scripted now and modularized later"

Only true if by "later" you mean "probably never".

[crucialfelix]

is CMS supposed to mean Configuration Management System ?

If so, that's a really awful re-use of a TLA (three letter acronym)

Many people still refer to any website that is editable as a CMS - Content Management Systems.

so please don't call it that, it will only sow confusion

[headstorm]

The term CMS has been used to mean configuration management system for longer than it has been used to mean content management system. One can find articles from 1990 using it in the former context, while the latter appears to have been used since the late 1990s.