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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

It's like Ansible.

That's what I discovered by reading the homepage.

I would disagree with that since ansible actually does two things simultaneously: cloud provisioning and local provisioning (and that "local" is actually hiding a 3rd axis, actual local, not just local to the managed instance, say for example if you needed the azure libraries or such, you can use a pre_tasks: block to create a virtualenv and install the deps locally before firing up the main workload)

Reasonable people can 100% disagree about whether yaml is the correct packaging for those operations, and ansible is a bit too imperative for my liking, but as far as "I have one hammer..." it does all the things

Any kind of provisioning doesn't seem too far a step though. It is just another "operation" with its own state management logic.

I mean, I hear you in that python is Turing complete so all things are possible through another level of indirection, but I didn't see one shred of amazon.aws.autoscaling_group anywhere in their docs so .. what, I write my own? If I was going to go through the trouble of writing custom shit for Yet Another Awesome Cloud Thingy I'd fire me

The fact that Pyinfra does not currently support a feature which can be implemented using Pyinfra philosophy does not make it different than Ansible. I believe that was what the parent comment was about.

Ansible can technically do cloud and local provisioning, just as Terraform can technically do cloud and local.

But practically, these tools have their areas of speciality.

> just as Terraform can technically do cloud and local.

I feel as though we're splitting hairs here, given there is, to the best of my knowledge, no `resource remote_file make_sshd_config { inventory_host = "whatever" dest = "/etc/sshd_config" src = "./sshd_config.tmpl" vars = {...} }` in TF. There is template, and there is local_exec and the rest is a Simple Matter Of Programming :-/

I'm waiting patiently for someone to chime in "well, just spawn ansible in local_exec" as if they're missing the point

Digging in the docs, it uses words like "inventories" and "operations" which indeed look like a configuration management system, much like Ansible, it's agent-less.

And that's cool- Ansible is a bit of an oddball system, but then I'm still left wondering, why is this better, or why it is better for the author at least?

I've used cfengine, Puppet, Chef, bcfg2 (briefly) and ansible. I want to know what makes this tool different and better. :)

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