Ansible has its strengths, but there's something to be said for the simplicity (and auditability) of shell scripts.

And frankly, after having some very sensible patches rejected (this was a few years ago, before the acquisition), I got fatigued of the entire project.

Ansible is nice, but it has some annoying quirks:

- YAML quoting.

- Quasi Python expressions from Jinja 2.

- Which fields are expressions and which ones are strings is not always clear.

Agreed, although I will say the templating has improved over the past year to be more consistent and full-featured cf. Jinja 2 proper, and they are now enforcing interpolation instead of inferring expressions (e.g. if foo is an array you have to write `with_items: "{{ foo }}"`; `with_items: foo` was deprecated, and is an error as of Ansible 2.0 IIRC). The quoting issue is still there, although once you learn the two or three rules it really isn't a day-to-day issue, and Ansible tries to warn you if and when it sees something problematic.

I spent hours trying to get ansible installed properly on arch linux. It just wasn't meant to happen. So I wrote a shell script. The thing is it was easy to get it working on OS X.

I use Ansible on Arch Linux to manage my coreos and Raspbian based Kubernetes cluster. It was just a `pacman -S ansible` away, and installed super easy. What were the problems you ran into?

Yeah, I'm sure Ansible is good and I'm sure I would've liked it as much, or more, than Chef.