"A good alternative" according to what criteria ? "Ansible annoying" according to what criteria ?

Ansible always win: no agent, works over plain ssh, gazillion of modules ...

It just takes a little while to learn to be efficient with it apparently.

The people i found "hating" ansible just didn't know the few options they needed to understand what's going on.

I'm with you. I've been using Ansible for all my work the past 3 years and I haven't seen any thing that it hasn't been able to handle. It's incredibly flexible and if you use the inventory and variable precedence correctly then it can be very deterministic.

I've seen examples of how Ansible will keep recreating instances but that's only if you don't define what your infrastructure should look like in the inventory.

I have lately been thinking an Ansible-like approach but using compiled code, maybe using Go, could be a way to go. So I went looking for that, and found Sup. It was not what I had in mind but worth a closer look.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12183370

Edit: I have not tried it

I have been contemplating adding a small DSL that compiles to Ansible, as i find writing Ansible config files very tedious and boring. As its just YAML, it should be quite easy to generate the output.

I know of one Ansible config file: ansible.cfg. Are you talking about the config files that you deploy to the servers?

sorry, I call the YAML playbooks config files sometimes. but yes, something that can compile down to the YAML files or other tools as well. Abstract away the abstraction basically.

Same here. We should create an efficient compiled version of Ansible, same feature set much faster execution, single configuration file flavor (only yaml)

My idea is different. Instead of playbook yaml, playbook go source, that compiles to a fat binary that is transferred over ssh. That decreases the dependencies to ssh only on the target hosts (no python). The framework would include an idempotent API that matches all the tasks that Ansible provides.

Yes, you are thinking about the same. I would just use YAML for the things that can be configured.

Is execution speed really an issue? Unless you're parsing millions of lines of YAML, it's difficult to believe that's a bottleneck.

I reckon a good benefit would be static typing and intellisense.

It is, Ansible is pretty slow at scale (100+ servers).