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@@ -81,6 +81,44 @@ Finally you should see be able to access the production Nomad and Consul by brow - Nomad: http://localhost:4646 +## Why not Ansible? + +I often get asked why not use Ansible to deploy to remote machines, as this +would look like a typical use case. There are many reasons, which basically +boil down to "I really don't like Ansible": + +- Ansible tries to do declarative system configuration, but doesn't do it + correctly at all, like Nix does. Example: in NixOS, to undo something you've + done, just comment the corresponding lines and redeploy. + +- Ansible is massive overkill for what we're trying to do here, we're just + copying a few small files and running some basic commands, leaving the rest + to NixOS. + +- YAML is a pain to manipulate as soon as you have more than two or three + indentation levels. Also, why in hell would you want to write loops and + conditions in YAML when you could use a proper expression language? + +- Ansible's vocabulary is not ours, and it imposes a rigid hierarchy of + directories and files which I don't want. + +- Ansible is probably not flexible enough to do what we want, at least not + without getting a migraine when trying. For example, it's inventory + management is too simple to account for the heterogeneity of our cluster + nodes while still retaining a level of organization (some configuration + options are defined cluster-wide, some are defined for each site - physical + location - we deploy on, and some are specific to each node). + +- I never remember Ansible's command line flags. + +- My distribution's package for Ansible takes almost 400MB once installed, + WTF??? By not depending on it, we're reducing the set of tools we need to + deploy to a bare minimum: Git, OpenSSH, OpenSSL, socat, + [pass](https://www.passwordstore.org/) (and the Consul and Nomad binaries + which are, I'll admit, not small). + + ## More Please read README.more.md for more detailed information + |