I want to see a fully fleshed out example for comparison. When I find some time, I plan to take this use case as an example, implement it in all major automation frameworks, and publish the comparison.

Right, I suppose for Ansible the idiomatic approach is to write/use a plugin - like:

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/firewalld_module.html

Expanding the white-list of ips is a matter of config/templates.

Fwiw, I do think Ansible tend to get a bit complicated because plugins tend to get a bit opaque and complicated. On the other hand, some simple special variables like "all_other_servers" to avoid manually filtering out "self" procedurally all the time is probably a good idea.

I'm not sure if I'll be able to spare the time - but I'll at least watch the github repository - perhaps I can try and help flesh out some alternative examples if you file an issue?

[ed: perhaps such things should go here?

https://github.com/myplaceonline/posixcube/issues/4 ]

Agreed. I referenced this discussion in that issue and hopefully soon I'll get around to building it (would be wonderful if you could help). Thanks for the pointers; they'll save me some time learning Ansible.