Red Hat is buying Ansible • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#181

Post by ryan_lane » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 1:57 AM UTC

pm90 wrote: post #137

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.…

If you're using Ansible for orchestration, you could try using the cloud's orchestration service instead. e.g. Rackspace Cloud Orchestration, AWS Cloudformation etc. In this specific case, you can use the orchestration api to spin up and manage the servers, and use ansible to manage the software (although there is a way to manage software as well [0]; I'm just not familiar enough with it to suggest it) Disclaimer: I…

Cloudformation is a shit-show. I wrote the boto_* modules in SaltStack to avoid using Cloudformation. It does magical shit like "oh, you wanted to change this one value? I'm going to rebuild entire portions of your cloud."

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#182

Post by WestCoastJustin » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 4:10 AM UTC

binaryautomata wrote: post #156

bigdubs wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

Are you for real? Look at my account history. You really think I'd spam HN. Been on flights all day or I would have addressed these comments earlier. Suspect these are just happy people. More than willing to address this with HN admins if they have any questions.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#183

Post by X-Istence » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 6:21 AM UTC

dorfsmay wrote: post #117

leg100 wrote: post #26

This clearly is much more about Tower, consultancy, etc, than their main product, but their yaml encoded language is an abomination; masquerading as 'declarative' and easy to read, yet piling on loops and conditional statements and an unintuitive inheritance tree of global and local variables.

I think when ansible started it wasn't obvious that logic (loops, conditional etc...) would be needed eventually. By the time it became obvious it was going to be required, it was too late to change. Using jinja2 for markup compounded the issue in my opinion, as it has no loops and logic is less than obvious (compared to mako for example). Still I find its agentless model, the idempotent model, being able to use it o…

{% for x in y %}

isn't a loop?

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#184

Post by samuel1604 » Sat, Oct 17, 2015, 8:12 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #155

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...

I think it's hard to compare RedHat to Mirantis even tho they are taking a bit of market to them they are not playing in the same league, it's like to say Docker is a great competitor to Vmware inc,

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#185

Post by JanusBifrons » Mon, Oct 19, 2015, 2:15 PM UTC

Hi all. I am a GM at Red Hat, and I have been deeply involved in the acquisition of Ansible. It's great to see so much interest and so many good questions. I hope that my blog post can help answering some of them: http://www.redhat-cloudstrategy.com/why-did-red-hat-acquire-...

Alessandro

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#186

Post by mianos » Thu, Oct 22, 2015, 11:19 AM UTC

kzhahou wrote: post #25

mianos wrote: post #9

If ansible is worth 100 what is saltstack worth?

Are you implying it's worth more or less? Or not implying anything but hoping someone here has an answer or analysis?

saltstack is a bit harder to get started but it is, IMHO, a much larger product. I am implying saltstack should be worth more. That said, ansible may prove to become more popular and grow to be bigger than saltstack.