Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with ansible?
Same, I looked all over the project and couldn't find a reason for using it vs Ansible.
Depending on your needs, one advantage over Ansible is lack of Python dependency.
A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
21–30 of 93 posts
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#22This seems more approachable than NixOS/Guix, which I see as state or the art for declarative hosts. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-... aims to flatten the learning curve for NixOS.
I love the concepts behind NixOS as well as Guix. I've tinkered with both, and Nix has served the daily driver role for multiple computers of mine.
One advantage this has over Nix is a simpler build toolchain. For some, that advantage may be quite useful. Even more so for the sh-based configuration management tool, rest[0], submitted several days ago.
While Guix is similar to Nix in it's higher amount of build dependencies, in theory, Guix's bootstrapping is at least elegant in comparison.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#23give me this for mac os please. my home-rolled dotfiles repo is ok, but id really love some config management system that’s not ansible that i could use to bootstrap my workstations. i used to write a lot of chef and generally like ruby, but i can’t make heads or tails of whatever progress chef is. mostly seems like chef as an oss tool is dead. anybody got something else they like to configure their mac os systems wi…
What's wrong with ansible?
Too heavy, too complex and too slow.
Although ansible can be used in local machine, but it is design for multiple remote machine. For example, if you want copy a config file to target, you must use some tools like `scp` or do some hacking. And it's much slow than shell script, and the print in stdio is ugly. (because it's design for running in 100 machines in one time.)
Ansible also had a steep learning curve, and redhat did not prepare a good beginner's manual for it. Searching the web there is only the experience of people who have used it for years, each with their own way of writing. There are no best practices for getting started easily.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#24I might just be biased by selective attention, but it seems like more and more of these are popping up lately. I feel like we will eventually recognize a variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule as common wisdom: > Any sufficiently complicated build system or configuration management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Nix. (Although to be honest it might make more sen…
I think it’s a cyclic pendulum sort of thing. We crave the networking/herding effect. So we promote a bandwagon, and try to get everyone on the same. We get there and realize we’ve turned a trip to Starbucks into an Artemis launch. Frustrated that we’ve rediscovered you can’t please all the people all of the time, we race back to individual tooling, each doing one task and one task well, factionalized and repeated in hundreds of tribes. It’s lonely at this extreme and we crave the networking/herding… coda.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's wrong with ansible?
Too heavy, too complex and too slow. Although ansible can be used in local machine, but it is design for multiple remote machine. For example, if you want copy a config file to target, you must use some tools like `scp` or do some hacking. And it's much slow than shell script, and the print in stdio is ugly. (because it's design for running in 100 machines in one time.) Ansible also had a steep learning curve, and re…
Ansible has a steep learning curve? The easiest thing to do is just a list of steps (playbook) and I'm sure that is in the getting started docs.
Modularizing complicates things obviously but for simple uses I don't see how it can be simplified much further.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
ansible just runs commands over ssh. can’t get more simple.
Except it is bloated and slow, and primarily only maintained by Red Hat where they don't fix bugs for extended periods of time. Their loops and register methods are extremely slow taking 30 seconds to delete a group of files and folders which only takes a second in Bash.
Also the deployments decay and break over time
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it is bloated and slow, and primarily only maintained by Red Hat where they don't fix bugs for extended periods of time. Their loops and register methods are extremely slow taking 30 seconds to delete a group of files and folders which only takes a second in Bash.
Also the deployments decay and break over time
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Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#28This seems more approachable than NixOS/Guix, which I see as state or the art for declarative hosts. https://discourse.nixos.org/t/documentation-team-flattening-... aims to flatten the learning curve for NixOS.
I’ve been reading the pills (tutorials) and it’s actually been pretty nice. You just have to realize it’s more complicated than mapping JSON YAML.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#29I might just be biased by selective attention, but it seems like more and more of these are popping up lately. I feel like we will eventually recognize a variant of Greenspun's Tenth Rule as common wisdom: > Any sufficiently complicated build system or configuration management system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Nix. (Although to be honest it might make more sen…
I tend to think about it differently: Some ideas get reinvented and simplified until only the idea is left. And the idea then seems so obvious to everyone that no one considers it necessary to have a reusable implementation. That isn't the same as NIH. It is sharing ideas rather than code.
Re: A configuration management system for computers that are pets, not cattle
#30> The idea behind Pets is that Configuration Management of individual hosts shouldn’t be harder than administering the system by hand.
Just administer it by hand and back it up.