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Wait, Ansible is sold as being idempotent? Really?

What about it isn't idempotent for you? Are you falling into the anti-pattern of using shell/command all over the place instead of real modules?

We have playbooks installing and managing our databases, web servers, VoIP PBX, DNS servers, backend services, and on and on. All completely idempotent and safe to run at any time against any host. No special effort whatsoever was required to make that safe to do.

Perhaps I'm not using it for its intended use case, but I've run into many issues where built-ins simply don't do the job. I'm using it for setting up my local personal machines, including a remarkable tablet.

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