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Comment by mdaniel | Hacker News Reader

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

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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

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.

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