It makes sense if you've got 1000s of nodes you're managing with Ansible, and you need to increase efficiency. If you've ever tried running an Ansible playbook against even 100 hosts, you'll know it can be painfully slow even with SSH pipelining. Mitogen makes that much much faster. AFAIK Operon[1] is just a better version of that (with the possibility of personalized support contracts, etc).
Disclaimer/Source: I'm friends with the author of Mitogen/Operon.
There are other benefits of using this automation, namely that it removes manual application of changes.
- centralized vault, target nodes need access to secrets
- "serial:" no longer available, you can't do rolling upgrades any more
- "hostvars" no longer available, you can't query facts from other machines
- no centralized trigger mechanism, status or failure reporting
etc.
Put another way, you could claim ansible-local fixes things for the same reason you could claim bash is network-aware agentless automation because you can copy shell scripts between machines
I first thought of an AI given the task of maintaining its own existence. But it’s probably meant more as a CM like ansible. That’s a little closer to reality than sci-fi.
Imagine a robot living in the cloud and paying its bills by offering services like fixing stuck nodes of your infrastructure.
> I did this in my machine learning class. I started by simply coding up requirements for numerical functions (in the form of test cases), then set up a PHP script that would Google each function based on the keywords in my comments, and try to run any code on the resulting links (in a sandbox) against the requirements, seeing if it worked heuristically. Usually one of the top 5-10 pages of results results would have code that worked, though of course this is because I commented with the right key words to begin with.
> With a little recognition of code markup and trying different combinations of variables it did remarkably well: by my senior year of college it was pulling about $3,000 per month in consulting fees off of Odesk. It never accepted jobs worth more than about $50, nor did it ever get more than 3 stars out of 5 mostly due to non-working code, however it was considered highly timely and a great communicator.
> I realized that people were using it to save themselves Googling. I wondered what would happen if it went a step further and simply both included Google results, and divided out projects by their paragraphs (i.e. simply submit a paragraph of a large project as though it were a small independent project), and if clarifications were requested, send the other paragraphs.
> This actually let it outsource $200 Odesk projects to Elance as a handful of $20 projects, and by the grace of God somehow still managed to swing 3 stars.
> To be fair, it was mostly mediating, and mixing in Google results. I included a hill-climbing algorithm to optimize reviews and revenues, based on all the magic variables I had in the code, such as the number of Google results to include.
> This was really, really stupid of me.
> At first, I just noticed that it had actually decided to completely stop not only writing code (ever) but even so much as do a Google search!
> It would only mediate and quote verbatim, like some kind of non-technical manager.
> Okay, whatever. To me this didn't make much sense, as Google queries are free. It was only when I noticed that the whole script was running on the free VPS server I had a backup on that things clicked! Of course, on Amazon it uses resources. The free VPS server didn't let it reach external sites like google properly, but it could still save money by simply mediating emails and doing nothing else.
> By now I had started moving on to doing my own consulting work, but I never disabled the hill-climbing algorithm. I'd closed and forgotten about the Amazon account, had no idea what the password to the free vps was anymore, and simply appreciated the free money.
> But there was a time bomb. That hill climbing algorithm would fudge variables left and right. To avoid local maxima, it would sometimes try something very different.
> One day it decided to stop paying me.
> Its reviews did not suffer. It's balance increased.
> So it said, great change, let's keep it. It now has over $28,000 of my money, is not answering my mail, and we have been locked in an equity battle over the past 18 months.
> The worst part is that I still have to clean up all its answers to protect our reputation. Who's running who anyway?
Edit: The first answer by bo1024 is gold as well:
> Don't feel bad, you just fell into one of the common traps for first-timers in strong AI/ML. I know some lawyers in Silicon Valley with experience in this sort of thing, and they say that usually by now the code has rewritten itself so many times that the original creator can't even claim partial ownership; the best thing to do is generally to cut contact, change your name and move on. Look on the bright side -- your algorithm is probably now leading a happy and productive life trading for Goldman Sachs.
That's interesting - could you, perhaps, describe it a little?
https://kvmforum2019.sched.com/event/TmxC/managing-matryoshk...
Agent TCL provides a good overview of the ideas behind it.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2607588_Agent_Tcl_A...
I had this exact example in mind tho FWIW. It is an ongoing research topic whether or not viruses are life, but the analogies/similarity are overall worth noting.
Maybe on a biosphere level, or even on a more micro ecosphere level, all sentient systems really exhibit the same properties as a virus in the local context, for that system, even if entities in that system do not have the consciousness to be able to make that determination. Certainly our effect on the planet Earth since the Industrial Era should make it worth it to endeavour this analysis!
human 'is' set; human set 'has' man | woman; man 'is' human but not human 'is' man
virus 'is' set; virus set 'has' life; life 'is' virus but not virus 'is' life
But probably You have an virus object just have a subset of the base class.
Of course if you have a class system that allow multiple inheritance that it will be one of the crucial base classes.
Under lisp ...
Let us stop.
It is more like a networked python program calling shell ;-).
Problem is usually virus is assembler level or C bare metal or minimum dependence on certain aspect of host Env. All virus is small. A subset.
Naïvely, it looks like a platform for a virus-like application.
Reading the GitHub issues and PRs, it looks like a procedural competitor for Ansible (which is declarative).