this post was submitted on 14 Jan 2025
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[–] mlg@lemmy.world 1 points 2 minutes ago

Last time I checked on ansible, it was a sysadmin complaining that he could just do everything better with vanilla bash scripts and that redhat keeps riding it because every company keeps asking for ansible experience, even if it's now a dated product.

And just personally, declarative anything seems to defeat it's own purpose any time you want to do something non standard, which comes up more often than you'd think.

[–] jaxxed@lemmy.ml 2 points 7 minutes ago

You forgot that it can run without ssh set up, by installing ansible on the machines and letting them poll for changes.

[–] bricklove@midwest.social 34 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I'M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!

[–] figjam@midwest.social 5 points 6 hours ago

I have to say, the resurgence of this energy in the last whenever has been refreshing. Can't we all just crank our hogs?

[–] CaptPretentious@lemmy.world 38 points 12 hours ago (6 children)

Honestly, fuck Ansible.

It's the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.

It's YAML is awful, it scales terribly, it's so fucking slow at literally everything, it gives people who have no clue what they're doing a false sense of confidence.

The number of times I've seen app teams waste the time of support groups and engineers because something went wrong and they didn't have the knowledge to know why and need to waste so many man hours having other people solve it for them. I (the engineer) was added to a chat that had 15 people in it because they, after running ansible, saw errors in their server... So clearly there was a problem with the server... At no point did they question there Ansible job.

Of the various tools I've used, I prefer Salt. The YAML is slightly less ass and it's so much faster while also seeming to scaling better too. It by no means is perfect.

[–] cosmictrickster@lemmy.world 7 points 9 hours ago

You had me at “fuck Ansible”.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 9 points 9 hours ago

Honestly, fuck Ansible.

It’s the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.

It's actually on par with 20-year-old tech. There's nothing it's doing that we weren't doing back then already in the enterprise space. And, in so many cases where Ansible's unable to respond well to changes to the system, it ends up not being on par with 20-yer-old tech.

Salt is better as it's one generation newer, aka last-gen. Puppet, salt, chef/cinc, all the same generation, and we get single source of truth and fast operation de

Current-gen is mgmtconfig, and from it we get instant/constant converging event-driven code. If you like ansible, you're gonna love sale or cinc. If you love salt or puppet, mgmtconfig will blow your mind clean out the back of your head.

100 servers? 5000? Ansible don't care

Sub-second convergence of thousands of servers. Files managed so hard you can't manually mod them as they revert immediately and it's an actual race to try and mod a file to use it, since it's hooked into inotify and friends.

James even put in a YAML-ish DSL for the crayola crew who haven't learned Go yet. :-P

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 5 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

Thanks for including an alternative you'd recommend!

[–] killabeezio@lemm.ee 4 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

Well you will be happy to hear that it's owned by Broadcom now. While salt is better, I wouldn't use it just because of Broadcom.

But then again, Oracle now owns Redhat, so....

[–] Lichtblitz@discuss.tchncs.de 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)
[–] killabeezio@lemm.ee 1 points 3 hours ago

Oops yeah. Not sure why I was thinking Oracle

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[–] slazer2au@lemmy.world 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

uses vanilla ssh

Clearly you haven't tried automation of network devices because it constantly bitches about missing ansible-pylibssh and falls back to Paramiko

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 2 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I was going to respond that those are both wrappers to ssh, but thought I'd verify first, and TIL "Paramiko is a pure-Python [1] (3.6+) implementation of the SSHv2 protocol [2]"

[–] superkret@feddit.org 5 points 10 hours ago

I love this meme format!

[–] ColonelThirtyTwo@pawb.social 45 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (3 children)

"Keep it simple" says the project that decided it would be great to program in YAML...

I've tried using it to manage a few home servers and parameterizing anything was painful and boilerplate-ridden

[–] tzrlk@lemmy.world 8 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Except it isn't actually YAML you're writing, it's a jinja2 string template that parses to YAML because the expressions they came up with ended up not being sufficient.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 4 hours ago

Mm, I love stacking weird formats. How many backslashes do I need for a regular expression to work right? 🥵

[–] Funwayguy@lemmy.world 12 points 16 hours ago (4 children)

Jist wait until you have to start fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python for different targets.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 hours ago

fucking around with multiple incompatible versions of python

They're being treated for PTSD in solaris-land.

Yeah. I said solaris.

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[–] LordKitsuna@lemmy.world 73 points 20 hours ago (4 children)

Anyone that says yaml is readable is psychotic. It's literally objectively not readable because a random white space character can break the entire thing and that's by definition not readable I can't see whether there's a white space or not without explicitly setting that up in an editor

[–] Deestan@lemmy.world 33 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

The scandinavian country codes, as understood by yaml:

  • se
  • false
  • dk
[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 8 points 16 hours ago (3 children)

Only 1.1. Which everybody has been fiercely clinging onto since 2009, because YAML 1.2 did not seem to consider it a problem that they broke backwards compatibility on that behavior. So now the only way to keep existing YAML files working is for us all to keep pretending YAML 1.2 does not exist.

[–] TheNamlessGuy@lemmy.world 2 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

"Broke backwards compatibility"

Brother, what do you think versioning is for?

[–] azertyfun@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

Which versioning????

somekey: yes

Go right ahead and tell me what the YAML version is and what is the type of somekey is. Oh that's right, it's impossible, because the versioning is entirely up to the serializers for some godforsaken reason.

[–] Deestan@lemmy.world 3 points 11 hours ago

Ow! My semver.

[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 points 9 hours ago

they broke backwards compatibility

Tell me this is post-y2k and built in the dark ages after we lost our mentors and gurus without using those words.

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[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 15 points 16 hours ago (2 children)
[–] milicent_bystandr@lemm.ee 1 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

After a suspicious-looking guide I nearly started with, and the NoxOS split drama, and having homemanager bork my login in a test setup, I wonder if next time I'll try GUIX.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 1 points 6 minutes ago

Yeah, guix started as a nix fork with scheme, we all dancing at the same party.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 15 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

NixOS : no dudes, its not raw screeching madness, its great. Just great. So great. Please read these 17 guides that are outdated more every minute to get started. Also, dont read that guide. We don't do that anymore, but there is no way for me to explain why unless you already know.

Ive tried NixOS three times now, and it hasn't took. Has anyone written a sane guide to the current iteration yet?

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 6 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

Listen. The more painful it is up front, the better you'll feel once you get it.

https://nixos-and-flakes.thiscute.world/

[–] ThirdConsul@lemmy.ml 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

This is the argument I use to convince straight guys to let me bum them

Just so you know.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 11 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

Ahh, I didn't realize we had mixed some "git gud" dark souls shit into my devops.

But seriously, I'll give your guide a look. Everyone should taste madness occasionally.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I mean... You liked dark souls, right?

Once nix clicks, you'll know the massive missed potential that ansible is (being just another abstraction layer, and not baked into the package manager itself) and you'll never look at ansible the same way again.

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 7 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (2 children)

Sure, but that doesnt mean I want to mix its difficulty into code.

I like fried chicken too, but i don't try to somehow add json to it, no matter how sexy those nested brackets get.

Good things dont all have to be sluiced together into a juicy pulp. They can be good all on their lonesome. I can "git gud" in dark souls and enjoy well documented, consistent IaC as well.

[–] paperd@lemmy.zip 1 points 8 minutes ago

If you're not eating fried chicken while playing dark souls and enjoying both... Then I don't even know what to tell you.

[–] zqps@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

Are you mixing metaphors or enjoying fried chicken in unconventional ways?

[–] mosiacmango@lemm.ee 1 points 45 minutes ago

Well, I spent a non zero amount of time trying to use the word "sluiced," so I think mixing metaphors is probably accurate.

[–] towerful@programming.dev 58 points 20 hours ago (7 children)

uses yaml for scripting so it's clean and readable.

Eh....

I guess yaml is fine.
I hate the significance of whitespace, and the fact that I cannot find any editor that can auto-format. Which are both related, I guess: there is no way to know a yaml document is actually correctly formatted without knowing the intended schema.

Whereas JSON doesn't have this ambiguity. But JSON has it's own drawbacks.

[–] kevincox@lemmy.ml 26 points 19 hours ago (3 children)

YAML is fine as a configuration language and ok data input language.

YAML is absolutely cursed as a programming language. As in Ansible has created a really shitty programming language inside of YAML. Should be burned with fire.

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[–] doeknius_gloek@discuss.tchncs.de 27 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago) (2 children)

I kinda like YAML for simple configuration files, but the YAML spec is borderline insane.

https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell

And don't get me started with ansible, it never works the way I think it should and almost every playbook or role I write is a pain to get right. When it works, it's a really nice tool and I couldn't manage my homelab as efficiently without Ansible, but it frustrated the hell out of me way too often.

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[–] hushable@lemmy.world 16 points 18 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago) (1 children)

I've been using Ansible for almost 10 years now and one thing I learned is to keep things simple, most issues I had with Ansible in the past were due to me taking the wrong approach to problem solving. In way, it forced me to not overcomplicate things.

I'm not the biggest fan of it, but I do prefer it over other IaCs.

edit: tbh my biggest issue with Ansible is other people who ask me "why not wrtie a bash script instead?"

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