Re:Ask HN: How do you handle configuration management?
by dozzie on Wednesday February 14, 2018 @08:34PM
(#16381256)
> This has me thinking Ansible.
Yeah, no, bad choice. Ansible only pushes configs to remote servers, and
on-line ones at that. Don't expect a retry if any of the servers is down. Good
match for deploying things, but terrible for long term management. It's
somewhat similar with this regard to Jenkins.
Also Ansible's approach of using SSH (directly to root or through sudo) is
brittle; prepare for outages if you start changing sshd config or sudoers, as
it's easy to cut off your all channels: configuration distribution, running
predefined procedures, and debugging. And there's more, like managing hosts'
public keys being PITA (as always with SSH) or weird way of encoding
a programming language as YAML with mismatching preprocessor (Jinja2).
If you have Puppet deployed, stay with Puppet for managing configuration.
Re:Ask HN: How do you handle configuration management?
by vr46 on Thursday February 15, 2018 @01:37AM
(#16382319)
That’s not quite true. Ansible will happily run locally without SSH. A machine can easily be configured to pull Ansible roles from git or S3 and then run a playbook.
Yeah, no, bad choice. Ansible only pushes configs to remote servers, and on-line ones at that. Don't expect a retry if any of the servers is down. Good match for deploying things, but terrible for long term management. It's somewhat similar with this regard to Jenkins.
Also Ansible's approach of using SSH (directly to root or through sudo) is brittle; prepare for outages if you start changing sshd config or sudoers, as it's easy to cut off your all channels: configuration distribution, running predefined procedures, and debugging. And there's more, like managing hosts' public keys being PITA (as always with SSH) or weird way of encoding a programming language as YAML with mismatching preprocessor (Jinja2).
If you have Puppet deployed, stay with Puppet for managing configuration.