memes

Since when is YAML readable and clean?

I hate anything that uses python or depends on whitespace in it's code. Nothing but fucking problems. You know what's hard to see an extra space in a line of code. A missing semicolon is so much easier to find.

i keep telling myself what a timesaver ansible is, while at the same time my simple scripts got abstracted and puzzled into more files, much harder to quickly read and understand them and after hours of frustration, ansible actually works. there may be multiple minutes of delay between my tasks wasting time like hell but it works (as in not randomly fails to connect). except when it doesn’t. there still is a playbook where the host cannot be reached and i keep on failing to understand why as everything appears to be the same and looks correct. there will be more hours wasted.

Last time I checked on ansible, it was a sysadmin complaining that he could just do everything better with vanilla bash scripts and that redhat keeps riding it because every company keeps asking for ansible experience, even if it's now a dated product.

And just personally, declarative anything seems to defeat it's own purpose any time you want to do something non standard, which comes up more often than you'd think.

You forgot that it can run without ssh set up, by installing ansible on the machines and letting them poll for changes.

Feels insecure

The enemy gate is down

Anyone that says yaml is readable is psychotic. It's literally objectively not readable because a random white space character can break the entire thing and that's by definition not readable I can't see whether there's a white space or not without explicitly setting that up in an editor

uses yaml for scripting so it's clean and readable.

Eh....

I guess yaml is fine.
I hate the significance of whitespace, and the fact that I cannot find any editor that can auto-format. Which are both related, I guess: there is no way to know a yaml document is actually correctly formatted without knowing the intended schema.

Whereas JSON doesn't have this ambiguity. But JSON has it's own drawbacks.

Honestly, fuck Ansible.

It's the dialup of automation tools. It was probably amazing 10 years ago.

It's YAML is awful, it scales terribly, it's so fucking slow at literally everything, it gives people who have no clue what they're doing a false sense of confidence.

The number of times I've seen app teams waste the time of support groups and engineers because something went wrong and they didn't have the knowledge to know why and need to waste so many man hours having other people solve it for them. I (the engineer) was added to a chat that had 15 people in it because they, after running ansible, saw errors in their server... So clearly there was a problem with the server... At no point did they question there Ansible job.

Of the various tools I've used, I prefer Salt. The YAML is slightly less ass and it's so much faster while also seeming to scaling better too. It by no means is perfect.

"Keep it simple" says the project that decided it would be great to program in YAML...

I've tried using it to manage a few home servers and parameterizing anything was painful and boilerplate-ridden

THANK YOU FOR THE SUMMARY, BROTHER. I'M GONNA TRY IT OUT AFTER I CRANK MY HOG. AROOOOOO!

Hello? Its me, NixOS.

I've been using Ansible for almost 10 years now and one thing I learned is to keep things simple, most issues I had with Ansible in the past were due to me taking the wrong approach to problem solving. In way, it forced me to not overcomplicate things.

I'm not the biggest fan of it, but I do prefer it over other IaCs.

edit: tbh my biggest issue with Ansible is other people who ask me "why not wrtie a bash script instead?"

I finally understand Ansible.