nixos-config VS Ansible

I use Nix/NixOS. My system state is a direct result of my config that is declared in a bunch of text files. For example, leaf packages that are installed system-wide are declared here: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/e646c4ec1aac80cfdf7b8c79debcfaee70237018/packages.nix

If it matters, my distro is NixOS and here's the machine's system config: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/95f9bb201ab4c2ab95fb3089909f5951a0646699/configs/HEPHAISTOS/default.nix

If something really goes south, I can have my entire system rebuilt automatically almost to the bit within 5-20min (mostly dependant on Internet speed) because my system is reproducible from just a bunch of text files.

Here's my desktop configuration to give you an idea: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/0e97d9af632852e7440563a9b5976663e61071b7/desktop.nix

If you want to know more: https://nixos.org/ Here's how such a system declaration can look like: My current desktop configuration, packages "installed" system-wide.

If you're looking for a way to restore your system configuration should your drive go kaput, perhaps look into declarative means of configuration instead. With those, your system is defined by a few text files and restoring or duplicating it is trivial. If you want to stay with Arch (great distro), imperative tools like Ansible, Puppet or Chef should work. If you want to try greener pastures, look into NixOS which is what I use. All I need to restore my machine is a few text files like this one (I just clone the git repo).

It only takes https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/master/configs/HEPHAISTOS/default.nix#L14 and all these settings are applied: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config/blob/af0960a7f7b0d6b9d775015c63a107ede6f63c82/desktop.nix

Here's the list of packages available in all my systems or my desktop configuration to give you an idea.

Set it up once precisely the way you like it, run forever. You only need slight tweaks every now and then to keep up with progress. On how many machines you want with as much shared configuration you want, any time you want. If your NixOS boot drive died, you could have a working NixOS system that's exactly[3] like the old one in a matter of minutes depending on your internet and hardware speed. (Without user data of course.) All you need is one (or a few if you prefer) lean text files that can and should be tracked in a git repo like this on: https://github.com/Atemu/nixos-config

Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool that simplifies application deployment, cloud provisioning, and configuration management across diverse environments. It uses a declarative language to describe the desired state of the system, and then takes the necessary actions to achieve that state. Ansible has become incredibly popular due to its simplicity, agentless architecture, and extensive community support. Document: ansible.com, ansible basics

Ansible v2.16

Ansible is a tool used to help manage software automation processes, configuration management across machines, deployment as well as remote execution of commands and scripts. In sports, Ansible operates as the coach of your team by providing strategies (playbooks), and actions, and ensuring the smooth execution of tasks across your infrastructure, just like a coach guides and directs players (Servers)during a game.

They support for-if from python, too: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/templates/#loop-f... but I haven't tried the "recursive" keyword to know if ansible supports that. I say "ansible supports that" because they don't just drop jinja2 into ansible and call it a draw, they have a bunch of custom execution integrations: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v2.16.3/lib/ansible/...

To manage a VM, you can use something as simple as just manual actions over SSH, or can use tools like Ansible, Hashicorp's Packer and Terraform or other automations. For an app where there is minimal load and security/reliability concern, VMs are still a great option that provide a lot of value for the buck

In this article's context, it is simply a tool that provides a declarative way to automate your machine/OS to configure the development machine as you want (install package, modify the configuration, etc). Examples of these tools are Ansible, Puppet, etc.

Now we're getting more tangential, but for years, Ansible releases were named for Van Halen songs (see old Changelog here: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/blob/v1.8.4/CHANGELOG.md)

In the lab to follow, we'll quickly provision a 3-node kubeadm cluster (1 master, 2 workers) on the cloud provider of your choice using an automation stack comprised of OpenTofu and Ansible, then deploy Rook Ceph using the official Helm charts and confirm that we are now able to successfully create CSI volume snapshots from PVCs by reusing the MinIO example from our last article.