I found Ansible as a product, lacking. Granted maybe some of the issues was because it was AWX? Unsure. But everything about it was like pulling teeth.
I personally prefer Salt, if for no other reason than it's significantly faster. And frankly I found writing the respective configs much easier to ready and follow with Salt.
I feel like Red hat has pulled off a remarkable marketing feat with Ansible.
I'm my work I consult with a lot of different sysadmins and have to be conversant in whatever they are using and that includes Ansible for a big chunk of the industry.
I'd say for about 90% of people I've worked with using ansible heavily after getting the hang of it, when they are being honest they don't see what it is getting them (generally it's a lot more tedious but not better than alternatives), but are afraid to admit it because "not getting Ansible" might be seen as being inadequate in the industry. And this is only counting the folks that I consider to have gotten far enough to be competent in Ansible, reflecting experiences of people who know how to use it, but still don't understand why they should see it as "helpful". Lots of people don't make it that far (and those folks are even more shy because they think themselves "dumb" for not getting it ).
Completely agree. I haven't met a single person that has genuinely liked it. But they feel compelled to use it and speak highly of it because it's what you do in the industry. And a lot of the people that do keep pushing for it keep acting like it's going to be the single solution that fixes everything somehow magically...
And I don't know about you, but I know an excessive number of people it seem to think that if you want to idempotent then it has to be ansible... As if suggesting that it's impossible to be idempotent by any other means.
I mean I know people who have a lot of ansible knowledge and they were always like "yeah sure it's declarative, you can ensure files are the correct version and stuff", but that's so far away that is from what NixOS does (unless I misunderstood something). I mean, the same task can be accomplished alright, but it's a bit like writing your own NixOS.
Exactly, ansible is basically imperative, where write the steps declaratively.
Whereas nixos is more like a compiler that compiles to a working linux install.
If I added the software
myprogramand a config file at/etc/myprogram.conf, that’s pretty easy in both. But if I needed to to then remove those it gets different .With nixos it’s at easy as removing the two lines that add the program and the config file; after the next “compile”, the file is gone and
myprogramis no longer available in the PATH.With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use
apt removeinstead ofapt installand to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.Don’t get me wrong, ansible is still better than writing a lot of bash scripts, especially if you don’t have people with a lot of shell experience.
But tools like nixos and guix are on a whole other level.
With ansible you need to change the relevant step to use apt remove instead of apt install and to change the config file step in a step that removes the file.
Wait until you have 2 services that use the same resource. Now you need:
- When both are enabled the resource is set up.
- When either one is enabled the resource is still set up.
- When neither is configured the resource is removed.
Doing this with Ansible is a nightmare. And 99% of the time you don't even realize that you have this problem until your configs don't work for some reason.
You get a declarative config with ansible so long as you also reinstall the system every time. That's how it's meant to work professionals in an immutable setup. The power of ansible is that you can also use it as mutable on an existing infrastructure or on firewalls and stuff. It's power is it's flexibility to be do anything.
I've been looking into Ansible for exactly this reason.
Good to know its going to be an uphill battle.
I play games instead. Good luck!
