前幾天在 Hacker News Daily 上看到「Five Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier」這篇，裡面提到了一些 Ansible 的用法還蠻有用的，算是開始用 Ansible 後應該都會有幫助的用法... 不過 Hacker News 上的討論「Ansible Techniques I Wish I’d Known Earlier (zwischenzugs.com)」比較精彩...
目前在頂端的留言對 Ansible 幹到不行，尤其是那個 YAML 格式：
Ansible is abysmal. I don't know why anyone still chooses it. It's a mess of yaml and what feels like a million yaml files that is always extremely hard to follow. Honestly writing some python, or bash is a lot easier to follow, read, and understand. The only thing it has going for it is the inventory system. I wish ansible would die already.
然後講到 bash 與 python 之類的工具時有人提到 idempotent：
>bash and python
Neither of those of idempotent.
馬上就有人幹勦，大多數人在寫 Ansible playbook 時根本沒人在注意 idempotent，而且一堆 shell script 的東西被塞進 YAML 只能說痛苦 XDDD
Most of the ansible roles I come across written by my team are not idempotent either, its a huge lie that Ansible is idempotent. Its idempotent if you put the effort into make it be but if I see tons of shell or command module invocations without prerequisite checks to see if the work should be done. Most devs I see using Ansible treat it like a shell script written in YAML and to that purpose it sucks.
我自己目前會挑 Ansible 主要還是因為 server 不需要另外裝軟體，是個 production 為導向的設計，再更大的時候就要想一下要怎麼繼續搞下去了...