aviary.sh VS Ansible

In a way I feel that everything is an alternative to everything and at the same time nothing is.

As you said it all depends on the circumstances. But I don't really see Zig competing with Go. They both can do mostly the same things, but they both approach them from quite a different sides.

For example bash is being used in:

- gaming (https://github.com/JosefZIla/bash2048)

- web apps (https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd)

- networking

- CLIs

- distributed systems (https://github.com/frameable/aviary.sh)

- crypto (https://armedia.com/blog/blockchain-program-written-bash/ https://github.com/grondilu/bitcoin-bash-tools)

- systems programming (https://github.com/damphat/kv-bash)

- language tooling

Some of those make more sense than others. However we all talk about a mythical general case. For every language there are niches that are covered by it more significantly. For Go it would probably be web backend. It doesn't mean it is only suited to this one niche, it is used in everything. In general it is used there more. I don't believe that Rust sees the most use in the same niche to the same order that Go sees it.

Is Rust or Zig an alternative to php, awk or Lisp? In practice I don't really think so.

I guess it all depends on one's definition of "alternative". I don't think that a statistical Go programmer would see Zig as a real alternative. Statistical C programmer might see it as a Go alternative, but that probably would not be a question he would ask.

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.