munki VS Ansible

In the non-MDM tool space, look into Munki https://www.munki.org/munki/

this experience is an indication that the opco didn't hire the right expertise. If the numbers you quoted ie 30k desktops, 50k total were not macs, it's clear that the org didn't have the kind of mac experience needed to manage a a new org with all macs.

It's entirely possible for administration of macs.

Start networking/asking around with places like Disney or Pixar, etc which have a large amount of graphic artists using macs. For example, from Disney https://github.com/munki/munki gets you to a certain point.

Other tools like Kandji (lightweight) and the 900 lb gorilla in the industry Jamf gets you the other management / administration bits needed

If this opco that you referred to never got a Jamf rep to work with them and to try out their (yes, very expensive) products, then this is mostly inexperience with the mac ecosystem.

There's a decent open source option: https://github.com/munki/munki

I got to use it at work at Meta (as end user), and it seemed to work quite well. They delivered Android SDKs/IDEs and a bunch of other things that I'd personally install through Brew with Munki.

Munki is not an MDM and I recently learned there's this project called Installomator that might help.

Or Munki

This is a feature of munki called default manifest resolution. Though I prefer to avoid this and explicitly set the client identifier for all devices.

another option is munki https://github.com/munki/munki, for the software update part,

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