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notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

Dynamic inventory. I haven’t used it on a cloud api before but I have used it against kube API and it was manageable. Are you saying through kubectl the node names are different depending on which cloud and it’s not uniform?
I’ve tried ansible vault and didn’t make it very far… I agree that thing is a mess.
Thank god I haven’t ran into interpreter issues, that sounds like hell.
Ansible output is terrible, no argument there.
I don’t remember the name for it, but I use parameterized template tasks. That might help with this?
I think this is due to not a very good IDE for including the whole scope of the playbook, which could be a condemnation of ansible or just needing better abstraction layers for this complex thing we are trying to manage the unmanageable with.

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xantoxis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
Really all of these have solutions, but they’re constantly biting you and slowing down development and requiring people to be constantly trained on the gotchas. So it’s not that you can’t make it work, it’s that the cost of keeping it working eats away at all the productive things you can be doing, and that problem accelerates.

The last bullet is perhaps unfair; any decent system would be a maintainable system, and any unmaintainable system becomes less maintainable the bigger your investment in it. Still, it’s why I urge teams to stop using it as soon as they can, because the problem only gets worse.

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- notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
  You urge teams to stop using it [ansible?] as soon as they can? What do you recommend to use instead?
  
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  - xantoxis@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Well people use ansible for a wide variety of things so there’s no straightforward answer. It’s a Python program, it can in theory do anything, and you’ll find people trying to do anything with it. That said, some common ways to replace it include
    
    you need terraform or pulumi or something for provisioning infrastructure anyway, so a ton of stuff can be done that way instead of using ansible. Infra tools aren’t really the same thing, but there are definitely a few neat tricks you can do with them that might save you from reaching for ansible.
    
    Kubernetes + helm is a big bear to wrestle, but if your company is also a big bear, it’s worth doing. K8s will also solve a lot of the same problems as ansible in a more maintainable way.
    
    Containerization of components is great even if you don’t use kubernetes.
    
    if you’re working at the VM level instead of the container level, cloud-init can allow you to take your generic multipurpose image and make it configure itself into whatever you need at boot. Teams sometimes use ansible in the cloud-init architecture, but it’s usually doing only a tiny amount of localhost work and no dynamic invetory in that role, so it’s a lot nicer there.
    
    maybe just write a Python program or even a shell script? If your team has development skills at all, a simple bespoke tool to solve a specific problem can be way nicer.
    
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    notfromhere@lemmy.ml ⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago
    Very insightful. I definitely need to check out cloud-init as that is one thing you mentioned I have practically no experience with. Side note, I hate other people’s helm with a passion. No consistency in what is exposed, anything not cookie cutter and you’re customizing the helm chart to the point it’s probably easier to start with a custom template to begin with, which is what I started doing!
    
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