Ansible - simple, clean, up and running in minutes.
April 01, 2016
Ansible - simple, clean, up and running in minutes.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Ansible
We use Ansible to provision web servers, load balancers and other pieces of infrastructure. We will also, on occasion use it to provision docker containers when the provisioning is too complex to fit into a single docker file.
We also use it to provision disposable local development environments that identically match production environments.
We also use it to provision disposable local development environments that identically match production environments.
- Ansible is extremely easy to use when compared to other CM tools. Developers new to Ansible can get up and running in very little time. This is nice, in that we can have a few people on each team that know Ansible well, but the other devs can all contribute.
- Ansible is agent-less, so setup is much quicker...the code all lives and is executed from one place.
- Ansible plays well with immutable architecture. It's every bit as easy to create a new server and destroy the old one as it is to update the old one.
- Yaml for configurations is an excellent choice.
- Tooling and documentation is growing now that it's not super-new anymore, but this was an issue for a while, primarily because the other main CM tools had simply been around longer.
- Large-scale use cases might benefit more from a CM tool with an agent.
- Jinja templates are used - many don't like this.
- It allowed my small team (part of a medium-sized company) to take on server architecture endeavors that we would have avoided if we only had Chef of Puppet, simply because the time from start to finish with Ansible is much more rapid.
- Many of our apps have short lifecycles. It's nice to have a provisioning script that doesn't require a large investment when your application's lifecycle is short.
- Having no agent greatly simplifies things. You can run scripts from any machine, or even from a development machine.
- Chef and SaltStack
Hands-Down what makes Ansible shine is it's simplicity. Other CM tools provide more features, but for many use cases, these features simply aren't needed.
Ansible is like a pocket knife - quick, small, easy to pull out and use, and so you always keep it in your back pocket. However, if you're working on a large, more specific infrastructure project, you may find Ansible to be lacking.
Ansible is like a pocket knife - quick, small, easy to pull out and use, and so you always keep it in your back pocket. However, if you're working on a large, more specific infrastructure project, you may find Ansible to be lacking.