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Comment by pkkm | Hacker News Reader

Programming with string templates, in a highly complex and footgun-rich markup language, is one of the things I find most offputting about the DevOps ecosystem.

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I believe Satan itself decided to mix YAML, Jinja and Turing-complete logic when it created Ansible. It truly is the sendmail of the modern era.

Several years ago when I was writing a deployment system for a cloud distributed database, I tried to automate everything with Ansible playbooks and the Ansible "API" (LOL). I pretty quickly gave up on implementing anything but the most trivial logic in templated YAML and switched to Python (wrapping maximally-dumb Ansible playbooks) for everything nontrivial.

You might like pyinfra.

Just about every time someone complains about ansible, there's a comment to plug this project but pyinfra seems to opt-out of the cloud provisioning part, instead delegating to its terraform connector, which drags in all the nonsense that entails. That makes it not only less useful but (IMHO) a horrible name for a project that only does "remote execution" and not infrastructure. The fact that it's even missing @aws @azure @gcp connectors further solidifies "who is the audience for this thing?"

Not everyone runs cloud servers. pyinfra seems to fit my needs like a glove, so I guess I am the intended audience.

I never liked the provisioning overlap Ansible has with Terraform, so it makes sense to me: provisioning servers with tf, configure them with another tool, whether it’s ansible or pyinfra. Well, at least in theory

There’s a lot more to infra than the cloud, pyinfra is designed to work in any of these environments not just the over-abstracted, over-hyped cloud. There’s plenty of good tools for setting up the infra, any pyinfra can easily be integrated.

> Just about every time someone complains about ansible, there's a comment to plug this project but pyinfra seems to opt-out of the cloud provisioning part

Which Ansible is absolutely atrocious at, so that makes sense. Use the best tool for the job (so Terraform, maybe Pulumi/tfcdk if you hate your future self/future teammates for infra.

This is why I generally use Terraform for Kubernetes. It's not perfect, but it's miles better than the various different YAML-templating solutions (Kustomize, Helm) popular in the Kubernetes ecosystem.

Two different stateful recordkeeping control planes with disparate opinions about the current state of the world. What can go wrong.

To be fair one of the most common ways of managing Kubernetes clusters and what is deployed on them is to use ArgoCD, which gives you the same issue of dual stateful control planes.

Even more fun is if you then run your Kubernetes cluster on top of a VM orchestrator such as vSphere, that way you have multiple layers of stateful control planes and compute orchestrators fighting each other.

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