Ansible VS pyinfra

Ansible GitHub Repository

Ansible is an open-source tool that excels in infrastructure configuration. With an agentless architecture (no services need to be installed on the managed machines), it communicates with machines over SSH.

Visit the repository for code and examples.

I do believe that using containers makes a ton of sense in writing data pipelines. You can use the same image to develop and run the pipeline, preventing "it works on my machine" issues. You can test different variations of the image without having to stand up additional infrastructure or potentially breaking the workflows of others who're using the same infrastructure. Finally, knowledge of containerization is increasingly expected of all engineers, while knowledge of other tools that solve similar issues (like Vagrant or Ansible) is less common.

Bearing in mind that YAML is still used widely in build and testing production-level environments, it proves to be an essential tool for managing configurations and data interchange. Its readability and flexibility make it a popular choice for defining automation scripts in Ansible , where it streamlines IT task automation. Similarly, YAML's role in Github Workflows facilitates the configuration of CI/CD pipelines, making testing and deployments more efficient. The continued evolution and integration of YAML in these critical areas underscore its ongoing relevance and effectiveness in simplifying complex workflows and configurations. For me, if it works, the it is not a failure.

2. Ansible with AI-Powered Automation

8. Ansible

In my previous article I went over how to set up VMs in Proxmox VE using Terraform to deploy the VMs and Cloud-Init to provision them. In this article I'll discuss using Ansible playbooks to do further provisioning of VMs.

You might notice that the Terraform template definition is pretty close in structure to the one I used in my last article. That's intentional - I set up the last one with cloud-init, but didn't do much with it. This one actually provisions the VM with cloud-init. You can also use Ansible playbooks to provision a VM, and I might talk about that in a future post, but in my next post I'm going to talk about doing something actually useful in my home infrastructure and setting up Plex.

pyinfra – automates infrastructure using Python

There is https://pyinfra.com/

As a sidenote, I also made a small experiment a while ago : https://github.com/linkdd/tricorder/

But it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. Without users, I don't know how it should be used, without features I won't get any users. So for now, it's in a state of "I'll address bug reports and feature requests, but I won't actively develop it".

I like https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra. "pyinfra automates infrastructure using Python"

Only played with it for a little but it seems well designed an simpler alternative to ansible, chef and other such things.

Haven't used it in anger yet, but I have high hopes for PyInfra: https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra

pyinfra - https://pyinfra.com/ - Pyinfra is simpler for me than Ansible. I completed the entire deployment in one afternoon, from installing and configuring the VPS server from scratch to deploying the application and automatically restoring the database from a backup.

I’ve replaced Ansible with PyInfra where ever possible. https://pyinfra.com/ is very clean, and fast but lacks the shear amount of automation that can be found with Ansible.

Some folks don't like YAML all that well, and I can understand where they are coming from. I wish Ansible provided a good Python API so that playbooks could be written in Python easier. But there is a project called PyInfra that is trying to do something similiar to Ansible, using Python as the configuration language. https://pyinfra.com/ It is still pretty new so not got nearly as many modules written for it yet.