forked from Deuxfleurs/nixcfg
38 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
38 lines
1.7 KiB
Markdown
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# Why not Ansible?
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I often get asked why not use Ansible to deploy to remote machines, as this
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would look like a typical use case. There are many reasons, which basically
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boil down to "I really don't like Ansible":
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- Ansible tries to do declarative system configuration, but doesn't do it
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correctly at all, like Nix does. Example: in NixOS, to undo something you've
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done, just comment the corresponding lines and redeploy.
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- Ansible is massive overkill for what we're trying to do here, we're just
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copying a few small files and running some basic commands, leaving the rest
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to NixOS.
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- YAML is a pain to manipulate as soon as you have more than two or three
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indentation levels. Also, why in hell would you want to write loops and
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conditions in YAML when you could use a proper expression language?
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- Ansible's vocabulary is not ours, and it imposes a rigid hierarchy of
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directories and files which I don't want.
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- Ansible is probably not flexible enough to do what we want, at least not
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without getting a migraine when trying. For example, it's inventory
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management is too simple to account for the heterogeneity of our cluster
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nodes while still retaining a level of organization (some configuration
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options are defined cluster-wide, some are defined for each site - physical
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location - we deploy on, and some are specific to each node).
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- I never remember Ansible's command line flags.
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- My distribution's package for Ansible takes almost 400MB once installed,
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WTF??? By not depending on it, we're reducing the set of tools we need to
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deploy to a bare minimum: Git, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, socat,
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[pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/) (and the Consul and Nomad binaries
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which are, I'll admit, not small).
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