Semaphore – Modern UI for Ansible

The name is kind of ironic. A "modern ui" for something named after a high-tech science fiction communication device is named for an old low-tech communication method.

A slightly different question to sibling ~MuffinFlavored, what use case does this solve for that running ansible from your existing CI infrastructure doesn’t? If you’re at the scale where running from a laptop doesn’t work, wouldnt you already have some form of CI in place to get to the point of needing whatever role ansible is servicing?

Isn't there a a chicken and egg problem with Crossplane? A quick glance over the docs tells me I need a cluster to already exist. So how am I provisioning that cluster? Terraform.

The most interesting concept is "Build & Deploy" and it's a pity that it isn't described even on conceptual level.

I think the "Build & Deploy" for configuration management is the right thing, but it looks like Ansible is not very good tool to implement it (and honestly, I don't know any mainstream tool that is really good at it).

I was trying to implement it as follows:

- part of a role is executed locally, building all the configuration files from templates (build); - configuration built locally is rsynced into dedicated directory on target server, deleting unnecessary files etc (sync); - part of a role is executed remotely, setting up symlinks from real configuration paths into synced dir and running all necessary actions (restarting services etc).

Yes, it's possible to write Ansible playbooks and roles that way, but in practice you are permanently struggling with the default Ansible playbooks and roles organizational structure.

I believe the only devops tool that really supports this style of things now is Nix and all the infrastructure around (and conceptually it's perfect, but in practice it has it's drawbacks).

It's not idempotent, it's not even "declarative" (what a joke that concept turned out to be), its dependency tracking / detection sucks, trying to manage changes between state files and code is a nightmare (there is no relationship between the state version and the code version - and these people made a DAG?), the arbitrary way it's designed to locate and use files / modules is unnecessarily painful and restricting, the plugins are usually pretty bad (no consistent conventions, inconsistent code coverage, difficulty in passing/embedding state or data between providers), the limitations of how you can compose HCL (as in what parts of what functions / data objects / attributes / etc you can use what syntax or features) is literally because they just designed it wrong and you have to wait for the next breaking change for them to re-design it to function correctly again, the state file is literally a boat anchor that you can't pull up, they intentionally leave auto-importing out because "we think it's a bad idea" so somebody else had to invent a whole other project just to implement it, magic environment variables, the "features" you can only use if you're a paying customer, the shittily designed opinionated features that don't work outside one use case (workspaces), the masses of duplicate code from modules being a crappy abstraction, lack of backwards compatibility, the incredibly consistent ability for the state to break on apply causing you to copy old state, look up man pages, import current state, manually edit json files, and hack up code just to be able to apply one single change to one single resource, and the biggest flaw of all, there is no abstraction that allows you to just say "make me a VM in these 3 clouds" because everything is so tightly wound around very specific APIs for specific providers with specific features etc, templating sucks, and the "structure" of how you "use it" is so unnecessarily stupid that there are at least 5 projects just dedicated to making it manageable for a human being to run the damn thing.

That is literally just from the past 3 days of using Terraform. It's not fantastic, it's cancer. The designers are either morons, or don't use their own tools so they don't see all the problems, or they just don't care, or they intentionally made it Regretware so that once you feel enough pain you will pay them for better features or to manage it for you. Probably a combination of all those.