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Red Hat is buying Ansible

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Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#151

Post by cls59 »

mverwijs wrote: post #147
nailer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible's Python as well, so will integrate well with the rest of RHEL, whereas Puppet was nearly the only Ruby tool in the Unix sysadmin community. Not saying that one is better than the other, just than there's more Python out there in sysadminland.

sidenote: puppet is migrating to clojure. http://www.infoworld.com/article/2687553/devops/puppet-serve...

For server-side frameworks. Agent-side development is moving to C++. Plugins for Puppet are still written in Ruby.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#152

Post by Jweb_Guru »

zeveb wrote: post #132
Jweb_Guru wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lisp is not and has never been the right tool for configuration management.

> Lisp is not and has never been the right tool for configuration management. Why not? Configurations are collections of items, and among the things Lisp excels at is…lists of atoms. Take a look at https://github.com/ansible/ansible-examples/tree/master/lamp... (a simple LAMP stack implemented in Ansible). It uses a .ini-style file to manage lists of hosts, e.g.: [webservers] localhost [dbservers] bensible sensible W…

Oh, I didn't mean to say that S-expressions can't be used for configuration. It's that in general you don't want a Turing-complete language to do configuration management, because you want to be able to reason about things like rollbacks, dependencies and diffs.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#153

Post by swinglock »

justingood wrote: post #143
KarlPlatt wrote: post #78

My experience with Ansible has not been so pleasant. Especially performance is a jobstopper. In my environment it takes 20 min for 12 Servers to be setup with some Redis, Elasticsearch stuff. Quite some become_user directives, but 20 min for this kind of stuff is just not acceptable. After all, application settings needs to be tuned and iterated over, too. My idea was to develop the infrastructure with Ansible, e.g.…

Ansible 2.0 should have some new strategies to speed things up, depending on your requirements: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_strategies.html It will be interesting to see how performance is after it's released. We eventually settled on having Ansible build an AMI for us that can then be spun up by as part of a Cloudformation template (also initiated by Ansible). We've actually been moving further and fu…

What do you use for configuration management?

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#154

Post by kashyapc »

mugsie wrote: post #85
mattzito wrote: post #55

I think the price point here is about a couple of things: - Chef and Puppet are too expensive for most companies to acquire, and have too much operational cost for too little revenue - Ansible got a strong following in the SMB space, Red Hat probably thinks they can move that upmarket some - Ansible's agentless configuration management has potentially strong applicability in a container world (why do I need a chunky…

Yeah, OpenStack support will be a big thing for them I think. Ansible is growing its OpenStack support, and they might see an opportunity for the RDO product.

A minor nit-pick: RDO is community project :-)

If anyone is wondering what the 'RDO' acronym stands for, from the FAQ[1]:

"RDO has no expansion or longer name, officially. It is not an acronym or abbreviation for anything.

However, RDO does focus on building a distribution of OpenStack specific to Red Hat operating systems (and clones of Red Hat operating systems). So, in some sense you can think of RDO as being a project started by Red Hat to build a distribution of OpenStack.

The 3 letter meaningless acronym sort of comes from that line of thinking."

[1] https://www.rdoproject.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#155

Post by samstave »

mattzito wrote: post #55

I think the price point here is about a couple of things: - Chef and Puppet are too expensive for most companies to acquire, and have too much operational cost for too little revenue - Ansible got a strong following in the SMB space, Red Hat probably thinks they can move that upmarket some - Ansible's agentless configuration management has potentially strong applicability in a container world (why do I need a chunky…

Redhat and Mirantis are now direct competitors in the Openstack world. Redhat buying ansible, among the the great points you made, will further solidify their position in the Openstack world against Mirantis going forward...

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#156

Post by binaryautomata »

bigdubs wrote: post #149
sbierwagen wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, what's with all the spammy replies to this comment?

Either it's a strange coincidence or someone spent a lot of time and care creating astroturfing accounts. All are old, have comments and submissions, seem like real people.

They all appear to have suspiciously low karma and durations of consistent activity. I think someone cough went to a lot of trouble..

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#157

Post by eLobato »

xorcist wrote: post #73
chr15p wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its not a fork of Puppet, Satellite ships with its own copy of Puppet (3.6 iirc) which it integrates to provide the configuration management side of the product but its stock un-modified puppet. In fact the puppet side of Satellite is built around Foreman ( http://theforeman.org/ ) which is an open source project that isn;t Red Hat controlled so even if Red Hat wanted to move 100% to Ansible it would be very hard wor…

Oh, I understand it's stock Puppet inside the thing. But much of the tooling around it (the Hiera syntax, the dashboard, the DB) acts as an alternative to the tooling around Puppet. Satellite 6 and Puppet Enterprise are direct competitors, and there is not much further upstream development on Puppet 3.6, so I expect Red Hat to have to take on the necessary development work during the life time of the product. So, in…

Foreman is working on Puppet 4 support [1], and I'd say we'll try to push it forward sooner than later as soon as we complete the migration to Rails 4. Foreman is the upstream for Satellite 6.

[1] http://projects.theforeman.org/issues/8447

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#158

Post by wstrange »

icebraining wrote: post #141
JonnieCache wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is all well and good, but the devil is in the details. Like rdeboo says, what happens when you do need to change the datastore config? Databases famously need plenty of care and attention to achieve optimal performance. They are decidedly not fire and forget systems. How do I tweak my postgresql performance parameters in the immutable world?

You could keep Postgres in an immutable image, with only /var/lib/postgres in a separate volume. Upgrading the PG config would just be a matter of unmounting it, replacing the image and re-mounting. (Docker automates this with its "data volumes", but you can do it manually too).

In theory yes - but that strategy doesn't always work. Sometimes the implementation of the data store changes between releases - requiring an upgrade or data migration.

For large datasets that can take hours / days.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#159

Post by MrOwen »

lvandeyar wrote: post #131

I hope they don't kill the free version of Ansible!

Has Red Hat ever done this with anything? I think a lot of their products exist as open-source versions. Satellite -> Katello, OpenShift is open-source, CloudForms -> ManageIQ, Red Hat Identity Management -> FreeIPA, RHEL -> CentOS. I suspect the list goes on and I have a hunch they will open-source Tower in the near future.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#160

Post by samstave »

rjsamson wrote: post #107
nailer wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ansible's Python as well, so will integrate well with the rest of RHEL, whereas Puppet was nearly the only Ruby tool in the Unix sysadmin community. Not saying that one is better than the other, just than there's more Python out there in sysadminland.

I don't think that's necessarily true - both Puppet and Chef are Ruby, and you'll often hear Ruby referred to as the "lingua franca" of DevOps.

>* Ruby referred to as the "lingua franca" of DevOps*

I've been in IT since 1997, ops for a great portion of that and now "devops" since before that was a thing...

Never heard anyone say Ruby is anything... unless you were building or working for a Heroku based service or company I guess...

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