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Ansible only exists because of an influx of people who don't know how to do this.

Ansible exists because it makes things idempotent, which is great when you have to do a thing on 1,000 servers because you can just fix the role and re-run it.

Bash can be idempotent but isn’t by default, so you either spend time making and idempotent bash script or you spend time learning Ansible to accomplish the same thing in a reusable way

Ansible’s idempotency is dependent on the specific module being invoked. What ansible mainly brings to the table is the parameterized modules. Which brings us back to people adopting it because they don’t know how to compose one liners, quote them properly, and wrap them in a for loop.

Many years ago I wrote my own "cloud instance bootstrapper" that would pull a tar off of S3 based on EC2 instance tags / metadata, untar it, then run a script. I never got into Ansible and I hated having to rebuild AMIs for minor changes.

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