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by WestCoastJustin 4099 days ago
Have spent the past few months heavily working with Ansible and would totally recommend it for anyone wanting simple configuration management and orchestration. The barrier to entry is extremely low, because it uses ssh and there are no remote agents, so you can get going pretty quickly. I have an introductory screencast on in @ https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/43-19-minutes-with-ansibl...
1 comments
erichmond 4099 days ago
The other thing that should be noted is that ansible feels like (shell scripting)++. Other competitors I've used needed a much heavier cognitive load to get started.
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chimeracoder 4099 days ago
> The other thing that should be noted is that ansible feels like (shell scripting)++. Other competitors I've used needed a much heavier cognitive load to get started.

Having used Chef, Puppet, and Ansible, this is exactly why I prefer Ansible for all my projects now.

If you can write a shell script, you can write an Ansible playbook. It won't be a great playbook, and you get benefits from using their modules instead of shell commands (like idempotency). But you don't have to worry about learning a new DSL just to do write a basic playbook or tweak an existing one.

As a functional programmer, I understand the benefits and appeal of declarative syntax. Unfortunately, systems programming is the one place where it's really hard to be 100% declarative, because systems are inherently all about state[0].

[0] At least in 2015 - perhaps things will change as we move toward better containerization models

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cies 4099 days ago
> Having used Chef, Puppet, and Ansible

The only comparable system that I believe is a match for Ansible is SaltStack.

> As a functional programmer, I understand the benefits and appeal of declarative syntax. Unfortunately, systems programming is the one place where it's really hard to be 100% declarative, because systems are inherently all about state[0].

Have you looked into Nix/NixOS/NixOps? I think they have a really good approach to "functional configuration mgmt".

> perhaps things will change as we move toward better containerization models

I agree. When using scrappable VMs/containers (deploy to a new one, then scrap the old one) that are build from a description, it is in some ways quite close to approach in the Nix-camp.

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makmanalp 4099 days ago
And it's also not that it's just a /new/ DSL - every so often I find the DSLs annoyingly limited compared to having a full fledged programming language.
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