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In praise of Ansible

I've been using Ansible this last week and it's proved really useful.

Having run a ridiculous number benchmarking tests on AWS over the last couple of weeks, I've really appreciated how easily I can script the tests and pull the results back to my local machine for analysis. Doubly so when I needed to scale the test up to multiple machines; just add their IP addresses to the inventory and there's no more work for me to do. A huge timesaver.

I am also a fan of the simple configuration. In a way it reminds me of ant, which seemed to fall out of favour a while ago when everyone jumped onto maven, presumably for the dependency management.

My test flow was essentially:

Tweak parameters in a shell script on my local machine
Run the ansible playbook locally
Ansible uploads the shell script and dependencies to the remote machines
Ansible runs the shell script
Ansible copies all the results back to my machine

Results are parsed with some hacked-up scripts into tables in emacs org-mode then fed through org-babel to generate some charts with graphivz which I can use in a presentation next week.

Good stuff, another tool in the box.