THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I’M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!
I have to say, the resurgence of this energy in the last whenever has been refreshing. Can’t we all just crank our hogs?
Honestly, fuck Ansible.
It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.
It’s YAML is awful, it scales terribly, it’s so fucking slow at literally everything, it gives people who have no clue what they’re doing a false sense of confidence.
The number of times I’ve seen app teams waste the time of support groups and engineers because something went wrong and they didn’t have the knowledge to know why and need to waste so many man hours having other people solve it for them. I (the engineer) was added to a chat that had 15 people in it because they, after running ansible, saw errors in their server… So clearly there was a problem with the server… At no point did they question there Ansible job.
Of the various tools I’ve used, I prefer Salt. The YAML is slightly less ass and it’s so much faster while also seeming to scaling better too. It by no means is perfect.
You had me at “fuck Ansible”.
Honestly, fuck Ansible.
It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.
It’s actually on par with 20-year-old tech. There’s nothing it’s doing that we weren’t doing back then already in the enterprise space. And, in so many cases where Ansible’s unable to respond well to changes to the system, it ends up not being on par with 20-yer-old tech.
Salt is better as it’s one generation newer, aka last-gen. Puppet, salt, chef/cinc, all the same generation, and we get single source of truth and fast operation de
Current-gen is mgmtconfig, and from it we get instant/constant converging event-driven code. If you like ansible, you’re gonna love sale or cinc. If you love salt or puppet, mgmtconfig will blow your mind clean out the back of your head.
100 servers? 5000? Ansible don’t care
Sub-second convergence of thousands of servers. Files managed so hard you can’t manually mod them as they revert immediately and it’s an actual race to try and mod a file to use it, since it’s hooked into inotify and friends.
James even put in a YAML-ish DSL for the crayola crew who haven’t learned Go yet. :-P
Thanks for including an alternative you’d recommend!
Well you will be happy to hear that it’s owned by Broadcom now. While salt is better, I wouldn’t use it just because of Broadcom.
But then again, Oracle now owns Redhat, so…
IBM owns Red Hat.
Oops yeah. Not sure why I was thinking Oracle
I also appreciate the alternative suggestion. No terraform love?
Terraform and Ansible do different things, they do have overlapping features, but ultimately they’re Kent to do different things. I use them both at my current job with Terraform running Ansible
No terraform love
Terraform 0.12 was awesome. It had no supply-chain sploit risk, ran well, accepted add-ons easily, and was very powerful.
Then they got a registry for people to attack, an umbilical to operation that ubisoft would envy.
I’ve been unable to get anything newer approved so far, because of the risk . Sure, you firewall off the box running CI, but often it needs to get out to the world, and suddenly it’s a WAF on top of everything, and it’s a real mess … which they can eliminate by killing terraform usage altogether. And I don’t wanna see that, as while tf’s dsl is pretty weird it’s the least-worst tool out there.
uses vanilla ssh
Clearly you haven’t tried automation of network devices because it constantly bitches about missing ansible-pylibssh and falls back to Paramiko
I love this meme format!
“Keep it simple” says the project that decided it would be great to program in YAML…
I’ve tried using it to manage a few home servers and parameterizing anything was painful and boilerplate-ridden
Except it isn’t actually YAML you’re writing, it’s a jinja2 string template that parses to YAML because the expressions they came up with ended up not being sufficient.
Mm, I love stacking weird formats. How many backslashes do I need for a regular expression to work right? 🥵
Jist wait until you have to start fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python for different targets.
fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python
They’re being treated for PTSD in solaris-land.
Yeah. I said solaris.
Because group or host vars are hard?
No. Because the python version of the host and the target server must loosely match up. Otherwise you get some cryptic error messages in some unexpected modules. Red Hat’s solution: just manage RHEL 9 targets from RHEL9 hosts and RHEL8 from RHEL8 hosts. There is no official way to align python versions across that major.
I seem to remember having the same trouble, maybe with hiding vars from logs?
Hello? Its me, NixOS.
After a suspicious-looking guide I nearly started with, and the NoxOS split drama, and having homemanager bork my login in a test setup, I wonder if next time I’ll try GUIX.
NixOS : no dudes, its not raw screeching madness, its great. Just great. So great. Please read these 17 guides that are outdated more every minute to get started. Also, dont read that guide. We don’t do that anymore, but there is no way for me to explain why unless you already know.
Ive tried NixOS three times now, and it hasn’t took. Has anyone written a sane guide to the current iteration yet?
Listen. The more painful it is up front, the better you’ll feel once you get it.
This is the argument I use to convince straight guys to let me bum them
Just so you know.
Ahh, I didn’t realize we had mixed some “git gud” dark souls shit into my devops.
But seriously, I’ll give your guide a look. Everyone should taste madness occasionally.
I mean… You liked dark souls, right?
Once nix clicks, you’ll know the massive missed potential that ansible is (being just another abstraction layer, and not baked into the package manager itself) and you’ll never look at ansible the same way again.
Sure, but that doesnt mean I want to mix its difficulty into code.
I like fried chicken too, but i don’t try to somehow add json to it, no matter how sexy those nested brackets get.
Good things dont all have to be sluiced together into a juicy pulp. They can be good all on their lonesome. I can “git gud” in dark souls and enjoy well documented, consistent IaC as well.
Anyone that says yaml is readable is psychotic. It’s literally objectively not readable because a random white space character can break the entire thing and that’s by definition not readable I can’t see whether there’s a white space or not without explicitly setting that up in an editor
The scandinavian country codes, as understood by yaml:
- se
- false
- dk
Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.
“Broke backwards compatibility”
Brother, what do you think versioning is for?
Which versioning???
somekey: yesGo right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of
somekeyis. Oh that’s right, it’s impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.
Ow! My semver.
they broke backwards compatibility
Tell me this is post-y2k and built in the dark ages after we lost our mentors and gurus without using those words.
That’s what ansible-lint is for.
I mean sure or you could just start by using a format that’s not so painfully strict with how it’s laid out. I miss the good old INI config. It couldn’t give two shits how you format it, throw in random spaces random tabs random new lines so long as the value was correct
I hate ini. Lists stuck in ini.
uses yaml for scripting so it’s clean and readable.
Eh…
I guess yaml is fine.
I hate the significance of whitespace, and the fact that I cannot find any editor that can auto-format. Which are both related, I guess: there is no way to know a yaml document is actually correctly formatted without knowing the intended schema.Whereas JSON doesn’t have this ambiguity. But JSON has it’s own drawbacks.
YAML is fine as a configuration language and ok data input language.
YAML is absolutely cursed as a programming language. As in Ansible has created a really shitty programming language inside of YAML. Should be burned with fire.
Reminds me of AutoHotkey
AHK grammar is a fucking mess, honestly.
I guess it’s like HTML if it tried to also adopt it’s own scripting language. Whereas JS interacts with the HTML DOM. Sure, it has quirks, but essentially modified a config.
I’ve never found a nice way writing YAML with variables and configurability.
Trying to use yaml to natively describe how a yaml config should be produced is broken. It diverges from the underlying schema, and (because it’s.yaml) isn’t distinguishable from any other yaml.
Things like helm treat yaml as a template. And I don’t think language servers & tooling are up to scratch yet (happy to be corrected). So basic yaml formatters shit the bed.Yaml is a computer readable config file that tries to be human readable, and fails at being actually useful.
Why projects try and make it useful, I will never understand.
I honestly think generating yaml from something like python would be a million times easier.
But then tools like ansible adopt yaml to essentially be a scripting language. As opposed to creating an actually decent solution that uses both python (to generate) and yaml (to apply).
Or whatever language.
I kinda like YAML for simple configuration files, but the YAML spec is borderline insane.
https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell
And don’t get me started with ansible, it never works the way I think it should and almost every playbook or role I write is a pain to get right. When it works, it’s a really nice tool and I couldn’t manage my homelab as efficiently without Ansible, but it frustrated the hell out of me way too often.
I feel I spend more time iterating yaml.
There isn’t any tooling that actually helps you write it.I feel like there is a gap in the market for a solution that uses typescript, typed python or some other type-able scripting language, which then generates the yaml files.
A language that has language servers, intellisense, all the modern dev tools. Schemas are provided as simple type descriptors. And whatever script you write then produces the correct result.
Some sort of framework on top of that to provide an opinionated workflow, and some tooling to lint/validate/produce.
And the result is yaml files which can be checked/diffed against in-place config, and version controlled for consistency.You mean like ansible-lint or yaml-lint?
Are you looking for an editor that can format YAML out-of-the-box or with plugins? In my experience, most editors only support a small number of formats out of the box and extend that functionality with plugins. I have yet to find a solid, production editor without a decent YAML formatter. If you’re using one of the common commercial ones, Red Hat maintains many that work explicitly for Ansible.
XML master race
XML is extremely verbose.
Again, requires some other tooling to generate (I feel I can point to JavaScript for an example of XML manipulation)What’s funny is that if you use attributes a lot then XML can be about the same size as JSON. But people think there are things you should and shouldn’t use attributes for for some reason. The only thing XML has going for it is a really nice schema format, but even today that’s pretty moot. JSON schema and others are pretty well supported.
Yeah, reading XML without rendering it or at least with syntax highlighting is a pain.
JSON is way nicer.
I’ve been using Ansible for almost 10 years now and one thing I learned is to keep things simple, most issues I had with Ansible in the past were due to me taking the wrong approach to problem solving. In way, it forced me to not overcomplicate things.
I’m not the biggest fan of it, but I do prefer it over other IaCs.
edit: tbh my biggest issue with Ansible is other people who ask me “why not wrtie a bash script instead?”
Finally, KISS enforced software
I finally understand Ansible.
WASTHATSOFUCKINGHARD?!?!!
Also completely parses your whole goddamn secrets file multiple times per run, so if you need to change a single server, make sure you have time.
Wtf is SSH and why should I care?
SSH is a network protocol for making secure connections, allowing remote access to various systems. As for why you should care, if you didn’t know what SSH was, then you probably shouldn’t care since you aren’t the target audience. It’s fringe knowledge for me too.
