Extremely, absolutely, definitely no. It's alive and well, and still being used for new deployments.

There was a time when every startup used it. Now I don't know any startup that is. I suppose it's possible that the big infra managers use it with their teams. -- I wouldn't know, but the necessity for Ansible by the bulk of developers has evaporated due to containerization.

Ansible + Terraform is basically the modern infra stack if you’re not on k8s.

Ansible is a powertool for implementing idempotent configuration management. That pattern / paradigm is here to stay.

I'd never call anything imperative (as opposed to declarative) a power-tool for implementing idempotent anything.

Amen. Useful tool _in which one might_ implement idempotent patterns, yeah.

It pretty much is declarative enough to count, if you describe your operations in enough detail and rely on modules where you can. Not many people bother to go 100%, but you can easily get to 99%.

Mail.ru and Yandex used it, i've seen people deploy their Kotlin web apps

plenty of startups still using it

basically if you don’t want to go kubernetes, you’re gonna use ansible

I use it in my home setup to spin up some service that run in containers automatically. The flow is: change docker file, push, CI runs and validates, another CI runs that uses ansible to run those containers. I probably could connect directly to that docker machine but I don’t want to expose Docker API to the network so I just use ansible.

ansible is very much alive. kubespray deploys kubernetes clusters with ansible for example.

chef and puppet though? THOSE are dead…for new applications. many MANY big companies still use Puppet extensively for legacy config management.

Who (or what) is the contender to replace Ansible?

I think Nix is most poised.

If you don’t have a way to do immutable infrastructure, Ansible is still extremely alive.

Containerization in general?

Who configures and installs software on the container hosts? How do you deploy applications directly on bare metal or VMs? Those are still sometimes required or preferred for various reasons.

IMO, you can speak about the death of bare metal (which is slowly happening), but definitely not tools like Ansible. They've found their niche.