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Comment by sph | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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