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   Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 05:32:35 JST Charles Corbett

   I've used Ansible for over a decade, written probably a hundred roles most of which were used in production at large companies.

   I honestly can't stand it anymore. The entire ethos of their opinionation is old, worn out, lazy.

   An auto generated role from Galaxy init fails their own linter. This is fucking stupid.

   One of the first major things golang fixed when it got big was directory structure requirements because *everyone* hates it. Ansible is doubling down on it.

   I'm done with you

   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 05:32:34 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @chas there's a reason why Michael DeHaan walked away from Ansible...
     
     @SlicerDicer
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 05:57:33 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @chas @SlicerDicer I was really starting to like Salt and then the whole VMWare acquisition spoiled it. The codebase started rotting, community contributions dropping, and now VMWare is the bastard child of Broadcom.
     
     Not looking good there either.
     
     I'm currently living in Chef world which is OK. They're still an independent company.
   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 05:57:34 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @feld @SlicerDicer I just have all this experience with it and other tools like salt feel so foreign now. I feel stuck xD

   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 06:00:30 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @chas @SlicerDicer yeah I don't care much for most of the community cookbooks anyway, they're too weird and opinionated and often not even FreeBSD friendly. I just roll my own most of the time...
   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 06:00:31 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @feld @SlicerDicer I was deep into chef around 2014-2015 but then chef the company started stretching themselves too thin and the community cook books suffered for it.

     Also a reason the founders left there

   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 06:07:34 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @feld @SlicerDicer I feel like the industry moved on from configuration management with things like k8s gaining so much traction and the "neo" way of doing things leaving these tools to rot

     But nobody asks "who manages the back plane / system the runs the abstraction"

     feld likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 06:08:07 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @chas @SlicerDicer also k8s and "everything is an immutable image you deploy" is not the right solution for everyone. Most people do not operate at a scale where that is necessary or appropriate.
   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 06:40:57 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @feld @SlicerDicer so here's the thing. Everything I deploy IS an immutable image, built with Ansible, which is starting to fail me 🤦♂️

     feld likes this.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 09:01:07 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @SlicerDicer @chas https://github.com/mpdehaan/opsmop
   • Embed this notice
     SlicerDicer (slicerdicer@bikeshed.party)'s status on Saturday, 09-Dec-2023 09:01:08 JST SlicerDicer

     in reply to

     • feld
     @chas @feld I’ll just reply in line not any specific direction.
     
     Ansible is good for what it does. I won’t deny but it’s a pile of shit if you really need to get things done fast.
     
     Saltstack it’s like ansible with afterburners. That’s a fact. They didn’t do well with pull requests. There’s one outstanding I did for tar exclude that’s rotted since 2018. Ended up I just started making my own modules and states, custom utils and all that. Reimplementing many half ass items they did.
     
     Between both they didn’t work towards a usable end product as they ultimately became to sell a product. That product wasn’t what I used so I was off in the wind.
     
     I’ve been doing automation since 2015 at least.
     
     Now let’s dig into the details. Why was salt so concerned about modification to their code base? Well go look at it. Tell me what rational human could handle that code base. It’s duplicated code like CRAZY and the amount of changes to not be breaking? Means that it became their modules are stupid.
     
     Here I’ll just replace it. That’s what it became was not using salt as it’s documented. But to use the salt engine to run my code. That made me maintain so much code. It was really a lot of work for very little return after using chef. I wasted my life lol.
     
     Then they sold to VMware and it shit the bed. There is no value there.
     
     At any rate, I’ve got complete FreeBSD management tools on saltstack that are useless now. It’s not worth my time. Not to mention python really does suck.
     
     The day I stopped using salt was the day I stopped using python. That was the only reason I was using it.
     
     Blah is all I can say.
     
     Between all these and then using chef? I wanted to write my own solution but chef works. Randos develop for it as they dare to care. Unlike salt or ansible you don’t see the same level or commitment.
     
     I made this and then tried to talk about it. Apparently it was “so big” that it would require tons of review. Just based on the lines of code. Well that’s fucking stupid. What does lines of code have to do with something that doesn’t really touch anything else?
     
     https://github.com/SlicerDicer/SaltThings
     
     Wow too 3 years ago damn. Well that should give the clue that I gave up with any kind of contribution.
     
     Someday I’ll deal with it and make something that really fits my need. Till then? Chef is a wonderful toolkit for getting things done. Way less hassle than trying to bend salt to my will. I gave up on ansible in 2017.
     
     As to DeHann? Well he tried to do other automation solutions that were designed better. That was opsmops but it never took off. I had at length discussions about this with him actually. He did try to but inertia is always a hell of a problem.
   • Embed this notice
     feld (feld@bikeshed.party)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 04:48:35 JST feld

     in reply to

     • SlicerDicer
     @chas @SlicerDicer tbh I keep wanting to go back to cfengine which in my experience was best because it was like a hardcore enforcer of rules and scales really well but I just didn't like the syntax
   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 04:48:36 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @SlicerDicer @feld I did a lot of work with Chef and even hung out with a few of the founders in the 2015 era. I just never felt the need to return to it, I saw some of the internal mess. I was at chef conf 2015 and saw them launch Chef Delivery at a time when we really needed chef to support cookbooks better rather than focus on a new product.

   • Embed this notice
     SlicerDicer (slicerdicer@bikeshed.party)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 04:48:37 JST SlicerDicer

     in reply to

     • feld
     @chas @feld I dunno, it seems we are at a point where we need more options at least. The current status quo is not cutting it for this.
     
     Though I would say give chef a try.
   • Embed this notice
     Charles Corbett (chas@tty0.social)'s status on Sunday, 10-Dec-2023 04:48:38 JST Charles Corbett

     in reply to

     • feld
     • SlicerDicer

     @SlicerDicer @feld yeah I've been doing this for about 12 years now - and all of the options now suck to a point that I have friends seriously considering developing a new configuration management tool.

     Ansible is stuck in 2005, Salt is... weird, puppet was never good. My one coworker swears he'd rather write bash anymore than deal with the ansible ecosystem.

     I mean FFS a galaxy init role doesn't pass ansible-lint. I feel like I am going crazy.