Red Hat is buying Ansible • Hacker News Board

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#41

Post by reitanqild » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:24 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #40

anton_gogolev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I'm constantly amazed at how many projects use _serialization formats_ as a "programming language". LiquiBase, NAnt, MSBuild, Ansible.

Maven or pretty much anything XML based

In defense of maven it does provide neither branching nor looping statements so refering to it as a "programming language" is hard to justify.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#42

Post by roma1n » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:25 AM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #40

anton_gogolev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spot on. I'm constantly amazed at how many projects use _serialization formats_ as a "programming language". LiquiBase, NAnt, MSBuild, Ansible.

Maven or pretty much anything XML based

I haven't seen conditionals or loops widely used within Maven's XML.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#43

Post by devit » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:26 AM UTC

Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell.

Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#44

Post by crdoconnor » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:27 AM UTC

anton_gogolev wrote: post #38

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.

Spot on. I'm constantly amazed at how many projects use _serialization formats_ as a "programming language". LiquiBase, NAnt, MSBuild, Ansible.

It can work but it works best when the language is kept dumb.

A dumb declarative language is easier to understand and easier to maintain. It can be used to help maintain a strict separation of concerns.

The smarter you try to make the language, the worse it becomes. Ant & MSBuild AFAIK are basically full programming languages in their own right so there was really no point to them actually being their own language.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#45

Post by ericcholis » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:35 AM UTC

devit wrote: post #43

Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell. Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.

I've kept an eye on https://commando.io/ for the same reason.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#46

Post by objectified » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:37 AM UTC

devit wrote: post #43

Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell. Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.

Well, one of the main advantages of using a configuration management tool is that the configurations you're writing are actually repeatable, and these tools tend to provide you with a lot of modules that take this in regard for you. If you were to use pure shell, you'd have to take a lot of things in account just to take care of this aspect alone. Also, these tools provide abstractions that make it easier to execute things as a unit (such as adding a user and a number of things having to do with it) without having to think about all the details. Often, they can be used on multiple platforms in the same way, too. So yeah, I do think configuration management tools solve real problems.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#47

Post by togusa » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:42 AM UTC

devit wrote: post #43

Every time I use some "configuration management" tool I wonder whether it's really better than just using shell. Basically you lose a lot of time searching the web for how to do things that you already know how to do in shell, but the benefits are not so clear.

That's ok if you have a known good baseline configuration. In that case it's no different to say a Dockerfile.

However the config management stuff seems to come to light when you've got a mess on your hands and need to rationalise it and make it consistent.

I'm slightly leaning towards the "rebuild with known good baseline" state of affairs these days however even as a long time Ansible user. Rather than upgrade stuff, I build something new alongside and then do a switcheroo nearly every time.

One day, hopefully containers will allow us to have consistent state everywhere.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#48

Post by JonnieCache » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:46 AM UTC

ABS wrote: post #39

rdeboo wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see how that would work for stateless services. Just build a new image and discard the old one. But what do you do when you want to change my MySQL config file? Create a new image and somehow transfer the data? Or are the datastores somehow externalized? Then how do you synchronize shutting down the old image, then starting the new updated one, preventing them from accessing the store at the same time? The link…

I interviewed a few folks on the topic some time ago and published the results here: https://highops.com/insights/immutable-infrastructure-6-ques... I particularly like the definition that emerged: 'I see it as conceptually dividing your infrastructure into "data" and "everything else". Data is the stuff that's created and modified by the services you're providing. The elements of your infrastructure that aren't mana…

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?

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#49

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 9:49 AM UTC

anton_gogolev wrote: post #38

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.

Spot on. I'm constantly amazed at how many projects use _serialization formats_ as a "programming language". LiquiBase, NAnt, MSBuild, Ansible.

That's people constantly reinventing Lisp, refusing to use the right tool for the job. Greenspun's Tenth Rule also comes to mind.

Re: Red Hat is buying Ansible

#50

Post by vasco » Fri, Oct 16, 2015, 10:03 AM UTC

nzoschke wrote: post #7

Ansible is best of breed. But didn't Red Hat hear? Immutable infrastructure is the future! http://michaeldehaan.net/post/118717252307/immutable-infrast...

We're using it for immutable infrastructure where we build images with ansible and deploy those images. It's basically the same as a dockerfile and ultimately instead of a container you use a right sized machine. I don't really get the need to containerise everything unless you are buying big metal and deploying on top of that.