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Comment by badatnames | Hacker News Reader

It reminds me a bit of what Ansible got right: user communication. The underlying tech may have existed for a long time, but the genius is presenting it to a regular developer in a way that reads "yes, even you can understand ML, just using a little JSON". The contribution of that should not be understated, as has been clearly evident recently.

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Yeah except it doesn't really work. It constantly breaks underneath you. The whole system has to be managed, e.g NixOS, or else it's a house of cards.

I'm also not personally a fan of Ansible, but to claim it doesn't really work is quite breathtaking given the size of the installed base.

Arguably, it doesn't. Instead of a team of people doing break-fix on golden images you have that same size team of people doing break-fix on upstream playbooks. Lots of software doesn't achieve the goals but has a huge deployment story; not sure those things have ever been related.

> Yeah except it doesn't really work

It does "work", you can download ansible today and use it, it does what it says. Is it the greatest solution for all use cases in infrastructure? Of course not, nothing is. Do people misuse it? Of course too, we're all human.

Regardless of what tooling you use, we're all building houses of cards, and depending on the situation, try to hold down those cards as well as we can, balancing a ton of other needs and requirements.

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