212
Ansible casually administering hundreds or thousands of devices (lemmy.zip)
submitted 9 months ago by possiblylinux127@lemmy.zip to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
53 comments fedilink hide all child comments
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Technus@lemmy.zip 12 points 9 months ago

I decided I wanted nothing to do with Ansible when I was half an hour into reading the website and I still didn't have a fucking clue what it is or exactly what it does.

To this day, I couldn't really tell you. It seems to be basically a framework for automatically SSH'ing into machines and running shell scripts on them which doesn't sound robust in the slightest. It's like they took thirty years of sysadmins' discarded spit-and-duck-tape solutions and bundled them into a "framework".

I dunno how the fuck you're supposed to manage cloud infrastructure at scale with that.

[-] CosmicTurtle@lemmy.world 3 points 9 months ago

Yup. I used ansible for a good year, maybe two, and found myself asking, "Why the fuck am I maintaining some abstract thing when I can just write a shell script and deploy that?"

Cloud orchestration is better done with other tooling. Honestly don't see a use case for ansible beyond physical data center deployments.

[-] darganon@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

They installed it for us at work as part of a project, and we went to ask the ansible guy wtf we could use it for in a windows world, and he couldn't articulate how it would be an improvement in any way over a scheduled task.

[-] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It appeals to me for management of a windows machine for a few things:

  • Lots of machines at once, over winrm. Although ssh is the default, as ansible is linux first.
  • I don't have to learn powershell - the shared language means the windows teams and the linux team don't have to learn eachother's language. In ansible, it's very easy to avoid the footguns that come with something like bash, especially after you install the red hat linter, ansible-lint, which warns of ansible's own footguns.
  • easy to version control it
  • premade stuff: the official "modules" are massive and do a lot. There are also community packages: https://galaxy.ansible.com - of course, you should probably check any stuff you run first. But ansible is very easy to read.
  • built in secret management. Encrypt secrets, but still be able to use them smoothly with the automation framework.

For just one machine? Task scheduler is probably good enough. 2-3 machines, managed remotely? Ansible is at least worth looking at.

Edit: also, really good docs. Like, check out this active directory module with examples: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/collections/microsoft/ad/object_info_module.html#ansible-collections-microsoft-ad-object-info-module

The examples are very helpful, with things like getting a list of ad users. I used that to create a ansible script to shuffle all ad user passwords - while being a a linux lover who hates windows and has literally never touched ad before this.

https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/testing/users.yml

https://github.com/CSUN-CCDC/CCDC-2023/blob/main/windows/ansible/roles/domain/tasks/main.yml

[-] azvasKvklenko@sh.itjust.works 1 points 9 months ago

Nice, I love it

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (9 replies)
this post was submitted on 26 Jan 2024
212 points (96.1% liked)

linuxmemes

21047 readers
1018 users here now

Hint: :q!

Sister communities:

Community rules (click to expand)

1. Follow the site-wide rules

2. Be civil
  • Understand the difference between a joke and an insult.
  • Do not harrass or attack members of the community for any reason.
  • Leave remarks of "peasantry" to the PCMR community. If you dislike an OS/service/application, attack the thing you dislike, not the individuals who use it. Some people may not have a choice.
  • Bigotry will not be tolerated.
  • These rules are somewhat loosened when the subject is a public figure. Still, do not attack their person or incite harrassment.
    • 3. Post Linux-related content
  • Including Unix and BSD.
  • Non-Linux content is acceptable as long as it makes a reference to Linux. For example, the poorly made mockery of sudo in Windows.
  • No porn. Even if you watch it on a Linux machine.
    • 4. No recent reposts
  • Everybody uses Arch btw, can't quit Vim, and wants to interject for a moment. You can stop now.

    • Please report posts and comments that break these rules!

    founded 1 year ago
    MODERATORS
    poopsmith@lemmy.world
    zephyr@lemmy.world
    rtxn@lemmy.world