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Comment by sieabahlpark | Hacker News Reader

I think it's the case where traditional methods are faster because any issue already has a stack overflow answer. Whereas the new tech stacks are still in the discovery phase. Containers are useful and they do simplify application deployment in terms of dependency management.

If you've never used the full k8-native stack it's easy to dismiss it. K8 recently with operators has made running distributed software as easy as configuring yaml. It's the same struggle you have with traditional stacks while you discover which config values and ansible scripts get you what you want.

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Why are you defining Ansible as some script engine? "Bash on steroids" is definitely Ansible anti-pattern.

It's also the only model Ansible is reliable at.

At least I always found it hilariously problematic to replicate check state -> fix approach from other options.

> It's also the only model Ansible is reliable at.

Please elaborate more on your statement. I have folks within my team whose paycheck consists of their ability to write fully idempotent roles and playbooks. Well, even I can do this without any pain, but my expertise has shifted into Kubernetes in past years.

It's certainly possible. I used Chef for this. And spent a few years maintaining a pretty nice cookbook for a small startup.

Then tried to use Ansible to setup and maintain an OpenStack cluster. Biggest hell no so far I found in "orchestration and config management". It was a big ball of yikes and anti-patterns, plus it was extremely slow, brittle and hard to debug.

Is this Ansible's fault? No, of course not. But it's no wonder k8s seems the way forward. Having an active system that checks and maintains state and appropriate abstractions to describe apps, services, containers, volumes, network, etc. is easier than to write really idempotent playbooks.

In a way it is ansible's fault, at least from my point of view.

The reason is that the whole execution model of Ansible is essentially "a shell script in YAML form". Which makes it really, really easy to pick up for many system administrators. But it makes for (IMHO) harder time writing idempotent code, especially with some of the heavy ansible promoters being responsible for some of the worst code around (Red Hat).

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