Self-published Ansible book – 87k copies, 300k revenue, 41 revisions
I have mad respect for Jeff.<p>I really, really, <i>HATE</i> Ansible.<p>There is a special place in hell where all the worst of humanity go. It's a room where you must build either Ansible or Jenkins infrastructure, for eternity.<p>Since Jeff is a professional, I am assuming his book does not detail the myriad ways in which Ansible is just fucking horrifically designed and a nightmare to use. Where the docs are usually missing or incomprehensible. Where important features seem to just not exist. Where barely anything works - but when it does, it works in a totally asinine way, that you will spend hours figuring out. Even if you've done it before. Or the nightmare that is trying to debug it, or use it with modern cloud infra and best practices.<p>Sometimes - <i>rarely</i> - Ansible is an OK solution. It's more lightweight than its competition in the configuration management space, and it <i>can</i> be portable, if you add all the portability yourself. Well-maintained Galaxy stuff is quite useful and can save you weeks of time and years of therapy.<p>But for the most part, it and its Configuration Management brethren are better left for systems where someone is manually monkeying with them and breaking them, and you need something automated that also has some dependency-tracking to fix complex things for you.<p>The Cloud is still, sadly, mostly not immutable. So we still need shitty "orchestration" (Configuration Management) tools to maintain it. But I really hope they go away. I have never seen a Configuration Management tool that I have liked, because their very concept is automated duct tape.<p>(my bona fides: 20 years operating large-scale systems, including a reimplementation of DynamoDB, which was powered by OpenStack and AWS infra scaled dynamically by Ansible playbooks. I. Still. Have. Scars.)