On 2014-11-13 14:14, Josh Smift wrote: > AP> You run Ansible manually, I haven't talked to anybody who runs Ansible > AP> on an automatic schedule like Puppet and Chef are typically used. > > My sense is that the Ansible people think that would be a somewhat odd way > to use it. If you didn't make a change, why would you want to run it? If > you did make a change, then why not run it by hand?
To be fair, there is a pull functionality in ansible: http://docs.ansible.com/playbooks_intro.html#ansible-pull It actually uses git to pull the changes, and cron for the scheduling. It does require more scripting than you'd hope, especially if you want to capture it's output (so you know why it failed!). I use it on a handful of laptops, I guess it works (laptops aren't always there when you're ready to push). There's also Ansible Tower, and the documentation mentions "pull from source control". Tower is build for the enterprise, so it might be better at this. > For me, with a long history of thinking that systems should be constantly > ensuring that they're in the right state, that was a weird idea to me. But There is something to be said about not fixing what's working, it's nice to have a human control what gets pushed and when, especially for a small setup with tens of server. It doesn't scale, but bigger setup can have a large number of classes of servers and a strategy to roll out changes slowly. Another advantage of the ansible philosophy is that you really only need ssh access. I started using ansible when working at a place that took separation of duties to an extent where it was completely counterproductive, and the people with root were not supposed to install software, and the people managing software had neither root nor cron access (I wish I were kidding). Ansible totally saved us from the "word document configuration management" hell. -- Yves. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
