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I've only just glanced at flabbergast but in terms of readability at least - it seems far short of something like Ansible

https://github.com/apmasell/flabbergast/blob/master/flabberg...

(I'm not arguing that they solve the same problem - I really have no idea - but readability matters and choosing a JSON syntax over YAML or similar when humans are meant to be parsing it seems like a mistake)

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Flabbergast is solving a different but related problem, it's about expressing the state of your system. Lots of times you want to say the dev environment is like the prod environment, except for these 3 things. And by the way, anything in the European region needs different settings too that interact with dev/prod.

I'm a fan of Ansible, but it isn't really suitable for expressing multi-dimensional and multiple-levels of exceptions, from experience it works for about 2.

How that state is actually rolled out is the job of something else (which could be Ansible or the update portion of your cluster scheduler).

Fair enough but does that affect my thoughts on readability? YAML is actually a superset of the capabilities of JSON so as far as I know there's no inherent advantage to choosing JSON as the syntax.

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