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Discussion on: Why don't you use Ansible ?

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michaelcurrin profile image
Michael Currin • Edited

Our devops team uses a mix of ansible, terraform and puppet. They each have pros and cons in terms of running on host vs target machine and suited to managing AWS infrastructure or just updating packages on machines.

I forget the tradeoffs but Ansible came out as relatively light and easy for managing packages on a few servers without needing Ansible installed on the servers so i went with Ansible for home use.

However I find Ansible not intuitive to use. The Ansible way of doing things was confusing to learn and get right. Roles especially were too magical and I couldn't reason what they were doing when I could use some apt commands that are easy to run by hand on terminal. For only one machine.
I have setup iTerm on macOS so that I can SSH too many machines at once in split screens and run a command on all at the exact same time and this doesn't require Ansible.

I made a repo with my exploration in Ansible. I put all the install and run commands there including using sudo and ansible galaxy.

github.com/MichaelCurrin/ansible-p...

I don't know if Ansible has a preview but Terraform has a plan command which tells you want resources (such as servers) it will update and create and destroy before you actually apply it so it is nice for managing cloud infrastructure transparently. I don't know how well it handles package management or processes on a server

PS I recommend to use a spell checker to pick up your words to be fixed like powerfull and exemple
And the title could be phrased more naturally as "Why not use Ansible?" Or if you actually want a response then "Tell me why you don't use Ansible" or "Why don't you use Ansible"

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simerca profile image
Ayrton

Thank you for your complete feedback !
Ansible has an UI tool for view all of you want but , i'm alright with you when you say
Terraform is better for manage cloud infrastructure.

I want to know more about you iTerm config to tap multiple command line ?!

Thank you for feedback too about my spelling skills

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michaelcurrin profile image
Michael Currin

Thanks. The UI tool I found looks like a job runner similar to Jenkins which we use for work Ansible playbooks

github.com/node-ci/nci-ansible-ui

I've been working on a Terraform guide if you are interested.

michaelcurrin.github.io/dev-cheats...

Here is my iTerm guide :)

github.com/MichaelCurrin/code-cook...