> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn.
It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn?
I needed something that was very quick to learn and I had most of my setup automated in Ansible before I had even finished trying to learn the other options. Ansible won hands down on the "easy to learn" factor. So far it meets all my needs, and thanks to Ansible Galaxy, I've had to do very little config myself. 95% of the time someone has already written what I need.
> thus it's quite hard to learn
Then it's definitely the wrong product based on my requirements at the time.
>> It's like choosing programming language by selecting the one that's easiest for you to learn.
> It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn?
On its own it's not a wrong thing, but as I said, you didn't learn anything
substantially different, so you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale.
You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt, while you still
haven't seen a proper configuration management system.
If I had spent the time to learn a "proper" configuration management system, it would have been a loss. I had a very limited amount of time to make it worth automating what amounts to a few hours of manual work.
> you didn't learn anything substantially different
So what? Learning something substantially different wasn't one of my requirements. My goal was to automate a few simple deployments, including my personal laptop setup, which previously took at least a day. Ansible got the job done and I haven't looked back.
> You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt
You've said this enough that I'll push back. That's definitely wrong. I can write shell scripts. I would have never attempted this in a shell script. Ansible was far easier than writing a shell script, and it does a lot more than just executing scripts via SSH. For one, it checks the current state of the system it is configuring to determine whether or not software needs to be installed.
> you're stuck with the approach that doesn't scale.
That wasn't one of my requirements either. Although I'm not even sure your claim is true considering that there are some pretty big companies using Ansible, and it was recommended to me by someone who is one of the better programmers I have met in my long career.
The whole point of my original post was that I actually tried products instead of reading about pros and cons. Based on my needs, Ansible was far superior to the other products I tried. Because my requirements aren't your requirements. I'm not so sure why it seems that it's so important to convince me and / or others that Ansible isn't a real tool. People should spend some time trying a few of the most popular tools and decide for themselves which tool best meets their needs. Which may include constraints like how much time they can budget towards learning a tool. "Proper" tool or not.
>> You only added shell script SSH executor to your toolbelt
> You've said this enough that I'll push back. That's definitely wrong. [...] For one, [Ansible] checks the current state of the system it is configuring to determine whether or not software needs to be installed.
So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic
that is not possible to be called from shell? Because I could do pretty much
the same in a shell script just fine.
I've seen a different paradigm for managing servers, I thought about it for
a long time figuring out the differences from a shell script, and this is not
where they are.
> I'm not even sure your claim [the approach doesn't scale] is true considering that there are some pretty big companies using Ansible
There are many big companies that throw money at dumb processes only to make
them running, so this argument is pretty weak.
> [Ansible] was recommended to me by someone who is one of the better programmers I have met in my long career.
You see, precisely this is the issue here. It was recommended to you by
a programmer. You should have asked a sysadmin, because this is where
these tools come from and whose tasks they do. For some strange reason,
programmers tend to avoid tools available to sysadmins, which is a quite big
blind spot (even more so, since it's usually unrealized blind spot).
> So you claim that Ansible learns the state of the system through some magic that is not possible to be called from shell?
I never claimed that.
> Because I could do pretty much the same in a shell script just fine.
So could I. But I didn't have to. Because Ansible does it for me. So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell script executer".
> There are many big companies that throw money at dumb processes only to make them running
You said it can't scale. You're now moving the goalposts to "well, it can scale, but it takes more money".
> You should have asked a sysadmin
Fortunately I didn't ask this sysadmin because you keep confusing your own requirements with mine. I was never looking for a product that is best of class but takes weeks or months to learn. I've already made it dead clear several times that my most important requirement was "easy and quick to learn". Ansible is the best product of those I tried when that's the primary requirement.
> You see, precisely this is the issue here.
The only issue here is that you can't accept that Ansible was the best fit for my requirements.
> For some strange reason, programmers tend to avoid tools available to sysadmins, which is a quite big blind spot
Some programmers have enough common sense to not spend months learning a tool to automate a few hours of work that happens a few times a year. I asked my friend which would be the quickest to learn, he said Ansible, I wasn't hot on it because Chef and Puppet were more popular, so I tried learning Chef and Puppet and when I realized how long that was going to take I tried Ansible. Within a few hours I had everything automated with Ansible. It was hands-down the best solution based on my requirements. So I do agree there is quite a big blind spot here. But I wouldn't say it's on my side, or the friend who's advice turned out to be spot on. ;-)
> So right there, just by comparing my declarative configuration with the current system state, it's clearly adding more value than "shell script executer".
Very little value in this regard. As I said, I could just as easily write
declarative configuration for machine deployment in a shell script.
>> There are many big companies that throw money at dumb processes only to make them running
> You said it can't scale. You're now moving the goalposts to "well, it can scale, but it takes more money".
I'm not moving any goalposts. If a process takes unproportionately more money
or effort for more input, it doesn't scale. Heck, in this case it doesn't
scale even if it takes the amount of resources proportional to the input!
> [...] you keep confusing your own requirements with mine.
I don't. I'm saying that you didn't learn anything significant, and as such,
you would be just as good if you put some thought into how to do exactly the
same with the tools you had (shell scripts). But now you're probably worse
off, because you most probably got misled by Ansible's marketing into
believing it is also a configuration management solution.
While you were over there thinking about it, I had already completed the job. Which was my #1 requirement. It doesn't seem like you'll ever understand that different requirements often result in different tool choices, but that's ok.
> But now you're probably worse off
Probably not. I now have several things automated that I once had to do manually. I may not be the smartest person in tech, but I'm smart enough that if I need a better solution than Ansible at some point in my career then at that point I'll simply learn the better solution. Different requirements = different tool choices.
It is. Is there anything wrong with that if the most important feature to you based on your requirements is that it be the quickest to learn?
I needed something that was very quick to learn and I had most of my setup automated in Ansible before I had even finished trying to learn the other options. Ansible won hands down on the "easy to learn" factor. So far it meets all my needs, and thanks to Ansible Galaxy, I've had to do very little config myself. 95% of the time someone has already written what I need.
> thus it's quite hard to learn
Then it's definitely the wrong product based on my requirements at the time.