Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…
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Ansible
Score 9.2 out of 10
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The Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform (acquired by Red Hat in 2015) is a foundation for building and operating automation across an organization. The platform includes tools needed to implement enterprise-wide automation, and can automate resource provisioning, and IT environments and configuration of systems and devices. It can be used in a CI/CD process to provision the target environment and to then deploy the application on it.
Liquibase is very well suited for database schema management. It works great for any DDL/DML deployments, changes made to database are easy to manage, track or troubleshoot. It comes with a wide variety of Rollback options. Liquibase Policy checks are a great way to enforce standards around Database code development across organization and prevent any unexpected from being deployed
I'm going to say it is best suited for configuration management. Like I said, patching even with security, things of that nature. Probably less suited is hardware management, but Red Hat IBM/IBM has Terraform for that. So it's a trade off.
Debugging is easy, as it tells you exactly within your job where the job failed, even when jumping around several playbooks.
Ansible seems to integrate with everything, and the community is big enough that if you are unsure how to approach converting a process into a playbook, you can usually find something similar to what you are trying to do.
Security in AAP seems to be pretty straightforward. Easy to organize and identify who has what permissions or can only see the content based on the organization they belong to.
Reducing Compatibility issues, when we upgraded Liquibase from 4.2 to 4.9. The same changeset which we were able to run on successfully using 4.2, part of it was now failing when tried to deploy using 4.9
We are not able to see detailed logs (for different changes) in uDeploy when deploying changes through Liquibase
Liquibase should rollback the if any one of the changes fails.
Better documentation of how all the options/parameters are meant to be used (when creating things like jobs, templates, inventories, etc)
More recommendations of best practices as far as the best way to organize job templates, workflows, roles. Much can be found on how to organize pure Ansible, but not so much for AAP specifically.
I have found some things that seem like they should be easy but are not possible. Things like moving a host from one inventory to a different inventory. As far as I know this is not possible and requires deletion and recreation. Maybe I just don't know how this could be done or don't understand the design decisions behind this?
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
Even is if it's a great tool, we are looking to renew our licence for our production servers only. The product is very expensive to use, so we might look for a cheaper solution for our non-production servers. One of the solution we are looking, is AWX, free, and similar to AAP. This is be perfect for our non-production servers.
It's overall pretty easy to use foe all the applications I've mentioned before: configuring hosts, installing packages through tools like apt, applying yaml, making changes across wide groups of hosts, etc. Its not a 10 because of the inconveinience of the yaml setup, and the time to write is not worth it for something applied one time to only a few hosts
Great in almost every way compared to any other configuration management software. The only thing I wish for is python3 support. Other than that, YAML is much improved compared to the Ruby of Chef. The agentless nature is incredibly convenient for managing systems quickly, and if a member of your term has no terminal experience whatsoever they can still use the UI.
I gave this rating because I feel their customer support staff have a very good and deep knowledge about the product and they are very helpful when we are stuck on something. The customer support is passionate about their product and they are always ready to help their customer as quickly as possible.
There is a lot of good documentation that Ansible and Red Hat provide which should help get someone started with making Ansible useful. But once you get to more complicated scenarios, you will benefit from learning from others. I have not used Red Hat support for work with Ansible, but many of the online resources are helpful.
There is no real competitor when it comes to what Liquibase does - at least not at the time we considered it three years ago. It was an easy choice in this regard, but we could have said no to it if it made our workload more difficult. But our proof of concept showed there were easy wins to be had by implementing its software.
I used puppet prior to moving to open source Ansible and eventually to Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform. I appreciate the agentless approach of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and feel that its deterministic approach to applying code is superior to puppet
POSITIVE: currently used by the IT department and some others, but we want others to use it.
NEGATIVE: We need less technical output for the non-technical. It should be controllable or a setting within playbooks. We also need more graphical responses (non-technical).
POSITIVE: Always being updated and expanded (CaC, EDA, Policy as Code, execution environments, AI, etc..)
