Hacker News Reader

Comment by burntwater | Hacker News Reader

I feel like often people forget about the small to medium setups run by "The IT guy." I'm a jack of all trades technologist in a major theater. One hour I'm configuring our half dozen Linux servers. The next hour I'm creating AutoCAD drawings, the following hour I'm changing SNMP settings on our 2 dozen Cisco switches, and after lunch I'm designing the electronics for a new stage prop.

I don't have the hours and days to learn Ansible, and it doesn't make sense for such a small environment. And it's Yet Another Service my successor will have to learn in what is already an incredibly niche position.

However doing the same half-dozen steps on a half-dozen servers takes up real time. Tools like cssh, that take 15 minutes to learn and have an IMMEDIATE time saving payoff, are invaluable. And my successor can easily skip using the tool and just do things the hard way until they do have the time to learn more efficient tools.

View on HN

Ansible's ad-hoc is the thing that you can learn really fast. No need to dive into the all this idempotent paradigm or try to fully grasp the architecture of your configuration management solution to do the basics (looking at you, Chef). Just need to update sudo on 30 boxes? CLI and inventory file - that's all you need.

On the other side, do stuff like this all the time and you'll start to think that Ansible is just some kind of distributed shell executor on the steroids. Absolutely not. While other CM solutions tend to strictly put you inside their way of doing things from the very beginning, Ansible gives you the freedom about how you use it. That's why Ansible is a way to go tool not only for serious infrastructure engineering, but also a good helper for any IT-related tasks.

> I don't have the hours and days to learn Ansible

Really? Are you that filled or you don't want to use a minute of your weekend?

I've set up a few ansible tasks for occasional use like updating servers but I think it's worth learning. It's especially good when installing a new server. Run and it's to your usual state in no time.

The good part about task runners is that it is self documenting of your repetitive tasks and easy to share. You could create a shell script with comments but ansible is probably more portable.

It's hard to overstate the breadth of skills necessary for this position.

Is Ansible worth learning? Possibly. But there are 100 other things worth learning too, the majority of them not even in the IT space. My time and mental bandwidth are finite.

>Yet Another Service my predecessor will have to learn

Whoa! It's really a niche position if time is proceeding backwards at your job.

Or, possibly you meant "successor" :)

I did! And I made the mistake twice! Huh. 80 hour work weeks will do that to you (we're in the middle of tech/dress rehearsal now).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com