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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> Have to say I'm a bit puzzled by the claim of Ansible being "blow your brains out" difficult.

Well not blow your brains out difficult but "learn a new syntax, behavior, rules, depend on a new package" difficult if a few shell commands is all you want to do.

I can see where they are coming from. I can go a long way just using shell script to configure (and yes, you can make them idempotent too).

From your site:

> You already have a religious passion for a particular CM tool

Aren't you doing the same against Chef and Puppet then? It sounds like. Oh "comparison" -- yeah just use Ansible.

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Good point: "if a few shell commands is all you want to do."

Agree totally. If you're doing something tiny, then a few shell commands are what is needed, not a CM tool.

I'm speaking mostly about serious systems that businesses run on.

Ansible is not for everyone. Each tool has strengths and weaknesses. I generally push Ansible because it's the easiest to get started with, but can also scale to 10K+ nodes. If something simpler/easier comes along, I'll recommend that instead.

I suspect some combo of Docker and Ansible to ultimately be the simplest set up (in the near-term), but I'm actively learning that and not confident enough in it to be able to suggest it to newbies.

I'm all Ansible & Docker on my personal projects / servers, what a blast! http://gerhard.lazu.co.uk/ansible-docker-the-path-to-continu...

More focus on the "why", less on the "how" http://thechangelog.com/ansible-docker/

Well, I'm a Salt user and I was communicating with Matt during the writing of his book. During that time he certainly gave Salt a solid, fair evaluation. He also spent a lot of time hanging out in #salt IRC asking key questions, and answering some as well.

So I would suggest that it's natural and OK for someone's evaluation process to yield a favorite (apparently in Matt's case, it's Ansible), without it becoming a "religious passion."

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