61–70 of 94 posts
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a better alternative.
I have not been a big fan of Ansible due to some critical bugs (at least in 1.x) and the way how its community core committers are treating community requests like this. For one: Ansible 1.x cannot even print out the syntax error file and line number in the offending Playbook. [1] And their core committers ignored the issue and refuse to backport the basic debugging requirement after issue being opened 2 years. That…
disclaimer: i'm an ansible dev. As the ticket shows, this was added in the 2.x release of Ansible, that is why the ticket was closed. Adding this info required a major revamp of the parser, which we did in 2.x, for this and many other reasons. This is not a simple change in 1.x and we decided not to backport it.
I'm sure it's a lot of work, but a lot of your core and original users would appreciate it. Not implementing something as useful as that just has a "we got 'em, no need to do anything else for them" vibe.
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> Changing the contents of one file can take ~10 minutes. O_o That kind of simple operation just zipped by for me on Ansible 1.6, 1.8, 1.9, and 2.0. The only noticeably slow kinds of operations for me are generally the package installs (understandably). I don't use a ton of variables in my templates, though.
I have quite a few variables, yes. One of the files I change frequently is an external configuration file filled with credentials which is managed through variables. It looks something like this: {% for cred in credentials %} {{cred.key}}: {{cred.value}} {% endfor %}
{{ credentials | to_nice_json }}Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've found Rundeck to be a more flexible alternative to Ansible Tower, and Rundeck is open source: https://github.com/rundeck/rundeck
Not to hijack the thread, but any pointers to good resources to sell mgmt on Rundeck? We're currently using Jenkins(!?) for role, something that enforces a divide where developers are allowed to automate, but operations isn't.
(That said, Rundeck is probably more straightforward use. You could trigger it from Jenkins.)
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RE: "I like many things about Ansible, but the 'language' is an unreadable mess that makes termcap[1] feel like genius level UX design." I've been a puppet user, and long time chef user, and recently been using ansible for a couple of projects, but I can't learn to like the 'language' at all. I feel like ansibles YAML syntax is just hiding the complexity of configuration management from you. Which at first as a novic…
I think we have to distinguish two things going on in Ansible files. 1) It's declarative. So if you are looking for a procedural language, you will be disappointed. It's also declarative for good reason IMHO. 2) It's still hacky. If the 'language' remained entirely declarative then the YAML syntax _might_ have been ok, but the language looks like a poor design stretched beyond it's limits. Some people don't like the…
You want your config management templates to be as declarative as possible. "This is the desired final state", and that's it. Of course, in practice it's very hard to stay 100% declarative, but it's very good practice to try and keep it close to ideal.
It is unfortunate that Ansible has a complete lack of test cases around core modules and, as a result, people act surprise when they're broken in a new release. For example see this fairly critical defect with the s3 module in today's release: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/pull/3347
I'm hoping now that they are done rewriting the docker modules, and considering they are using docker as a selling point for 2.1, they will be more proactive with these issues.
1. https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/3219 2. https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/issues/3231
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Not to hijack the thread, but any pointers to good resources to sell mgmt on Rundeck? We're currently using Jenkins(!?) for role, something that enforces a divide where developers are allowed to automate, but operations isn't.
I'm trying to parse your statement and I'm not sure if you want something to enforce that divide or if your complaint with Jenkins is that it enforces a divide between dev and ops?
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RE: "I like many things about Ansible, but the 'language' is an unreadable mess that makes termcap[1] feel like genius level UX design." I've been a puppet user, and long time chef user, and recently been using ansible for a couple of projects, but I can't learn to like the 'language' at all. I feel like ansibles YAML syntax is just hiding the complexity of configuration management from you. Which at first as a novic…
I think we have to distinguish two things going on in Ansible files. 1) It's declarative. So if you are looking for a procedural language, you will be disappointed. It's also declarative for good reason IMHO. 2) It's still hacky. If the 'language' remained entirely declarative then the YAML syntax _might_ have been ok, but the language looks like a poor design stretched beyond it's limits. Some people don't like the…
I tend to think of Ansible as supporting a flexible combination of declarative and procedural approaches. Within a particular sequence of tasks, it's procedural. Those lists of tasks are typically combined into a role or the like that is typically more declarative in its application. Of course application of roles is actually procedural in that it happens in the same obvious order it's defined, but the higher level organizational constructs like roles have more of a declarative feel to me (I'd assume that's by design).
It is unfortunate that Ansible has a complete lack of test cases around core modules and, as a result, people act surprise when they're broken in a new release. For example see this fairly critical defect with the s3 module in today's release: https://github.com/ansible/ansible-modules-core/pull/3347
Definitely agree with this. I use the docker module extensively and found 2 regressions[1][2] that I went through the trouble of debugging down to a single commit, but still have no idea whether anyone is going to fix them. I'm hoping now that they are done rewriting the docker modules, and considering they are using docker as a selling point for 2.1, they will be more proactive with these issues. 1. https://github.c…