Good points Tim! I should probably add that when I wrote ansible, I was thinking all about inventory and groups as a method of categorization.
The roles are all about applying behavior to specific combinations of groups - and roles are just abstractions around task and variable boilerplate. Larger organizations are going to be more and more inclined to dynamic inventory and sources of truth - but the point at which someone needs this can vary. On Tue, Jul 1, 2014 at 3:51 PM, Timothy Appnel <[email protected]> wrote: > What you are describing sounds a lot like what I have at my day job -- > hundreds of instances of dozens of Java applications each with their own > properties like unique ports, file paths and whatnot. > > We addressed the things you are talking about by treating each app as a > host regardless of physical server and from there used host and groups > vars, not roles for what you are trying to do. Essentially roles start with > tasks and sometimes specialized modules. The variables and defaults are > there to support those tasks. Recently I created a module that reads the > properties file all of these application use for their configuration and > imports them as facts so later roles and playbooks can remain in sync with > little to no effort. > > We did toy with something like your approach of wrapping application > specific meta data as roles, but found that was messy and hard to manage. > (Roles get checked in and treated like code, inventory not so much.) > > So based on my experience I think your struggles are a modeling problem > like Michael suggested. > > <tim/> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Ansible Project" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/519faf83-1f5c-4058-a189-0689ffe46905%40googlegroups.com > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Ansible Project" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/ansible-project/CA%2BnsWgxwjPLXF4UyawhWDKR0%3D1Ku%3D3p5xpd05KO_i%2BRaQp%3DHoA%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
