Jeff Propes - Make Ansible Suck Less

SouthEast Linux Fest 2022
Ansible has followed a similar trajectory to MySQL; its success came too early, cementing many very poor design and implementation decisions before they could be addressed. In this talk, I will rant about^W^W discuss some of the roughest edges of Ansible that I encounter every day at work and how you can smooth them out or avoid them all together.
- How to eliminate hosts: all from your playbooks. Rely no more upon the dangerous limit feature!
- Writing playbooks & roles that perform equally well both on the command line and in AWX/Tower
- Inventory and playbook tricks so you don't have to input passwords every invocation
- When and how to use custom plugins
- A good old fashioned rant about the hash merge setting

[DeusGladiorum]

I’m not sure if the video covers all this yet, but I just needed the vindication of knowing that other people see this mess of poor documentation, almost exclusively global variables, conflicting design choices, the nightmare of trying to enforce deduplication in both roles and lazy-evaluated variables, and my favorite of all, the nightmarish, hours-long experience that is figuring out how to transform even relatively simple data structures from one shape to another.