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.