mgmt VS Ansible

This is a new provisioning tool built with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ that I hope both provides great value and also demonstrates the start of a new way to build certain kinds of software.

Thanks for reading!

I've looked briefly into this project before. Some ideas are similar to what I'm doing in https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ but the really weird thing is that I have no idea who's behind this language. A person? A company? A small group? Are they anonymous for some reason or am I oblivious?

I don't generally believe in orchestrators (they miss the point, things are not single computers and neither is the world) and so I have that feedback here but also for:

> Airflow/Cadence/Temporal/Databuilderframework?

Which don't really think about modelling non-centralized things.

This of course doesn't mean they're not useful, it's just that they don't have what I believe is a good long-term value proposition.

I'm incredibly biased because I'm working on programmatic, real-time modelling of distributed systems with https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

The DAG concurrency stuff feels familiar to what I've been doing with our language, mcl. https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Our goal is NOT a general-purpose turing-complete language like this one is, but we do some amazing lock-free, DAG concurrency things to achieve the processing wins.

I don't think it's good news, but why is anyone surprised? Nobody wants to pay for open source.

Companies want it for free, and individuals don't have enough luxury time to be able to do it themselves.

Prove me wrong and help patch or fund https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and you'll have an even better replacement for terraform!

Individual here, not a company. We'd love contributors to https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/

Eventually decided puppet wasn't a good enough tool to be able to autonomously deploy and continuously manage such clusters. So I started working on this https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ project. Not quite MVP yet, but trying to get there soon. Got distracted along the way with having to work real jobs (Red Hat, Amazon) to pay bills.

Yeah, that project is pretty much at the bottom of my list, unfortunately. My top projects these days are mgmt, klister, recursion-schemes, and hint... And that's already too much!

There are certainly faster alternatives out there (mgmt comes to mind) but then, they're not Ansible.

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.

Ansible-Core ↗

The lookup works fine when parsed as say a msg and braced in "{{ }}" but we're told not to use jinja delimiters in when statements (no idea on the whys to that to be honest) - The issue lies around the first ": " and yaml sees that everything preceding this being a mapping... I have tried all manner of fixes described in YAML syntax error when string contains a colon + space · Issue #2769 · ansible/ansible (github.com) but no dice... the error is a variety of 'The error was: template error while templating string' type errors depending on what attempted fix I'm applying..

IBM -> RedHat -> Ansible (https://docs.ansible.com/platform.html)

I think the new ansible docs are opaque, and the new "everything is an ansible collection" scheme makes troubleshooting any issues reported by users hundreds of times harder than "the old days"

I keep this (https://github.com/ansible-community/ansible-build-data/blob...) bookmarked because it's the only way to match up what "ansible 8.1.0" (https://pypi.org/project/ansible/8.1.0/) even means since it for damn sure not any of this: https://github.com/ansible/ansible/releases (they used to have a 'release' pinned on that releases tab saying "these are not the droids you are looking for"). I believe I tried asking for them to update the completely erroneous pypi "source code" link to point to that repo and ... well, one can see how well that turned out