GETTING STARTED WITH ANSIBLE
(Posted 2015-04-09 01:13:25 by corey_reichle)

So, I've been messing with Ansible [ http://www.ansible.com/home ] for a
while now, and I've got most of the tweaks worked out, and getting handy
with it.

Now, I'm going to toss out the playbook I built, and try to do it from the
start the Right(TM) Way.  My hacked-together playbook doesn't really follow
best conventions, it just worked well enough to orchestrate some laptops
and some lxc containers (Another post I'll be writing soon).

I'm definitely a fan of Ansible over Puppet.  Puppet seems geared towards
developers who want to play sysadmin (Or, at least get systems out of their
way enough to make apps).  I've also never been a big fan of Ruby, and in
fact, I quite dislike it.  I am definitely a fan of the agent-less way that
Ansible works, and also it's very declarative structure.

When someone says something is declarative, I'm expecting to see exactly
what is in the YAML files that make up a playbook.  Other things that claim
to be declarative aren't really (I'm looking at you systemd).

I also like it doesn't try to think for you.  Computers are shite at
thinking, which is why we all still have jobs.  Puppet tries to think to
much for you.  Ansible executes exactly what you've told it to execute, in
the order it's told to execute the task.

I'm sure I'll be writing more about it, after I start figuring out how to
do things the right way, but it's a testament it works as well as it does
when done wrong, and how quickly one can get up to speed with it.

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There is 1 comment on this post:

Comment #1 by New Workstation, New Distro, New Window Manager, New, New
New! – Corey Reichle (  ) on 2016-11-21 17:21:27
[...] while I use Ansible to manage the configuration for the system
overall, much of my config boils down to personal dot [...]


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