Ansible really hasn't changed all that much since 2016. It’s still brittle, verbose and ugly at its core.
Discussion
What's a better alternative?
No idea. I’ve used it for some client work here and there and I try to keep it as simple as possible but at some point you’re just fighting with a DSL when you actually should use a programming language.
Haven’t followed config management in a while. Was mostly just using terraform + cloud-init and if I had to deal with ansible, it was just fixing up what the client already had.
Looks like I’ll have to dive back into it.
Root cause is that it tries to control OS configs, which are brittle i the first case. Try NixOS
Tried to wrap my head around that once, didn’t click. Maybe I’ll give it another try some time.
