
An Ansible Tutorial - fideloper
https://serversforhackers.com/editions/2014/08/26/getting-started-with-ansible/
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dangerlibrary
I love Ansible.

What's scary about shell scripts is the lack of idempotence (if you
accidentally run them twice, things break).

What's annoying about chef/puppet is the bootstrapping overhead -- you can't
start from a blank slate system, because you still need to install puppet-
client or ruby+dependencies. So now you're paying to store a bunch of semi-
pre-configured images with some out-of-date ruby gems or an old puppet-client.
If you want to start from a blank image, then you're using shell scripts to
install the toolchain that will let you avoid using shell scripts (or worse -
doing it by hand!).

Ansible is idempotent ssh + shell scripting, so it solves the 'blank slate'
problem nicely. It only requires python, which is bundled by default on ubuntu
servers.

~~~
marcoamorales
I'm not sure what bootstrapping overhead you're talking about. You can do a
knife bootstrap to bootstrap nodes, not sure about puppet.

~~~
dangerlibrary
I didn't say it was difficult, I said it was annoying. The bootstrapping step
isn't just easier when using Ansible, it doesn't exist.

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fideloper
This weeks edition of Servers for Hackers goes from using ad-hoc commands
(shell and other modules), to Playbooks and finally abstracting everything out
to a Role with templates, files and variables.

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dyeje
I clicked on this thinking it would be something involving the ansibles from
the Ender's Game series which allow instant communication across large
stretches of space. I should probably take my lunch soon.

~~~
fideloper
That would be awesome, but sadly I haven't figured out beating the speed of
light for intra-galactic communication.

~~~
mcguire
Forget intr-galactic communication, we need c+ to talk to the bleedin'
cluster.

