If I may ask, what was the reason for moving away from Ansible and resorting to building something yourself? What kind of issues did you encounter that Ansible couldn't solve?
Oh, sorry, I didn't express myself clearly: freckles still uses Ansible under the hood, it's just that the whole project sort of went it's own way and dragged me with it. Feels like it, anyway :-)
freckles actually supports multiple backends, but Ansible is the only one that is implemented currently. I chose that mainly to take advantage of
all the modules and roles out there, those can all be used from within freckles.
As to it's disadvantages: for some things Ansible is a bit heavy (needs to be installed, and Python available/installed on the target), or not as well suited (orchestration -- although I'm quite happy with what it can do in that space), so the plan is to have other backends (shell, Terraform, direct K8s, etc) that are a better fit for whichever context you are operating in. And of course you will be able to mix and match.
Anyway, if I could have only picked one backend, I'd still go with Ansible. It's a great platform, and it can do almost everything.
If I may ask, what was the reason for moving away from Ansible and resorting to building something yourself? What kind of issues did you encounter that Ansible couldn't solve?