Local provisioning is too complex

[rollcat]

• Do we really need Ansible?
• Can we make it simple, robust, fast?

[maciejzasada]

What would be the alternatives?

[rollcat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bourne_shell

[maciejzasada]

We switched from shell to Ansible because shell was a mess. Why do we want to switch back? Is Ansible not working? Seems to be much better than shell at least.

[rollcat]

Is Ansible not working? Seems to be much better than shell at least.

Ansible's value is as a tool for managing infrastructure (think clusters / several remote machines), not for running apt-get in Vagrant. I think it's total overkill for this one.

We switched from shell to Ansible because shell was a mess.

If your provisioning is a mess, switching to a more complex tool won't solve anything.

Let's see:

• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/Vagrantfile - lines 8-20 and 43-61 - only to run Ansible? Overkill, you only need three lines to run it from Vagrant
• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/empty.yml - entirely redundant, run which ansible if you want to detect Ansible.
• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/install-ansible-dependencies, https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/install-ansible-dependencies.sh - redundant if we don't have Ansible.
• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/roles/gae/meta/main.yml - proxy role? What?
• OK let's check: https://github.com/maciejzasada/ansible-role-gae/blob/master/tasks/install-python.yml - this is a curl -O https://example.com/gae-sdk.zip, unzip gae-sdk.zip.
• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/roles/install-project-dependencies/tasks/main.yml - 2 lines of shell
• https://github.com/unit9/gae-secure-scaffold-python/blob/master/provisioning/roles/u9-common/tasks/main.yml - 3-5 lines of shell

Ansible is a golden tool as soon as you have more than 3 machines to manage remotely, and you can pry it from my cold dead hands for cloud stuff management. But on this project, we're driving screws with a hammer.

[rollcat]

Furthermore, it's difficult to run a deployment from a remote server (via SSH), basically the current state of things goes against everything discussed in the big "deployment kurwa" talk.