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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

if it was just incompatible syntax changes, that would be one thing. but it's not - it's incompatible administration and structure changes. they just stabilized the new modules shift a couple months ago, which restructured all their documentation and issue tracking, breaking uncountable links and closing thousands of open issues. and that wasn't the first time they'd done that.

at this point i've started transitioning as much of my administration stuff as i can away from ansible. there's some good stuff in their codebase, but it's easier for me to find it in the source code and copy-paste it into my own projects than it is for me to work within the ansible structure. ansible solved a lot of problems for us, but over the time we've been using it i'm pretty sure it's caused more problems than it's solved.

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> at this point i've started transitioning as much of my administration stuff as i can away from ansible

Any preferred alternatives you can share?

There's pyinfra (https://github.com/Fizzadar/pyinfra) if you like Python (disclaimer: I started the project), heavily inspired by Ansible just without the yaml/jinja2 hybrid stuff.

I've been following pyinfra precisely because every new Ansible release makes my heart sink knowing how much work it's going to cause me and how inscrutable debugging our playbooks is every time. I've been trying to find the time to port over all our existing Ansible playbooks but have really only scratched the surface so far. However, I have high hopes, pyinfra looks like a well thought through project.

Join the club of staying on Ansible 2.9 forever! It’s 2015 MacBook level good and still being developed. 2.9.21 was released two weeks ago and 2.9.22 is coming soon.

The way Ansible is developed it’s way easier to fork your own and backport bug fixes and features you need because it’s a toss up whether the fix you need actually got merged or whether it languishes in the GH issues.

i haven't even explored the options for shifting to another ansible-like system, i've just gone back to the supposed "bad old days" of a collection of random tools with shell scripts to fill in the gaps.

a combination of docker containers and terraform (for managing aws) is doing most of the heavy lifting for me.

I wrote my own remote scriptrunner thing because I hate Ansible so much.

I did this before with perl’s SSH::Batch. You can install it from CPAN and get really simple ability to run code on groups of servers in parallel. Works great.

Eventually I switched to Ansible because it made the more complicated things a lot simpler.

I use bash scripts too on almost all my systems. Containerize deployments. Dockerfiles are a godsend and work indefinitely.

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