Red Hat is buying Ansible

I thought so too for a long time. Until that time when I upgraded the RAID10 on our database servers from a 4 drive to a 8 drive configuration (which requires rebuilding the whole array if you want the performance benefits). Getting the intricate configuration of the two machines (postgres streaming replication works, but has a lot of moving parts to keep in mind) back without having to remember any details was absolutely priceless.

Completely wiping and reinstalling the main database servers (one after another of course) during the day while the system was in active use and completing the process with zero user intervention, that felt amazing.

Since then, whenever I had to reinstall a machine for one reason or another, I always appreciated the immense speed-up I gained by not having to ever manually re-do the configuration.

Better yet: All the years of growing the configuration, all the small insights learned over time, all the small fixes to the configuration: All are preserved and readily available. Even better: By using git, I can even go back in time and learn why I did what and when.

"Why am I using TCP for NFS? Oh right - that was back in december of 2012 when we were using UDP and we ran into that kernel deadlock" - that's next to impossible to do when you're configuring servers manually.

Syntax and semantics are separate, not having to learn a new syntax is handy.

Syntactically the problem I run into is that it's got it's own DSL in task definitions, so it can be hard to keep in mind what's YAML and what's the DSL.

Semantically loops and conditions are essential features so I don't have a problem with that. The inheritance could use some clarification, I was hit last year by a regression that remains unresolved.

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 agent to configure resources on my docker image? What if, for some reason, I need to affect change on running docker images? - I realize this is a bit of an anti-pattern for docker, but it was something I heard a lot from big enterprises)

$100m still sounds very high, kudos to the ansible folks who have come a long way in the last few years.

EDIT: one more piece I didn't think of here - the openstack side of things is an area where Red Hat has made big long-term bets for the future of the company, and it probably helps to justify the price in terms of backstopping their openstack support.

How many machines and how many types of machines do you deal with?

there is always script:

    - script: /some/local/script.sh --some-arguments 1234

originally one of the selling points of ansible was that you could just include a shell script and run it.

I've also often found much of my time wasted trying to get ansible to do something simple.