DevOps from Scratch, Part 1: Vagrant and Ansible

Ansible seems to be the best of the bunch, at least for my use-case which is just a handful VMs (Chef seemed to require more infrastructure than what it would be managing).<p>So let me rant about it for a bit:<p>- Whatever that language is, it&#x27;s not something invented on earth. I&#x27;ve given up on learning when to use quotes or how it wants its indentations and just copy&amp;paste&amp;destroy everything&amp;restart when it doesn&#x27;t work after 15 minutes.<p>- There are a few thousands tests in their test suite, which makes it quite a feat to introduce a bug that breaks what amounts to &quot;passing variables to a subroutine&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;17356" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;17356</a>. (2 hours today I won&#x27;t get back). I seriously don&#x27;t know any other software where I spend most of my time reading through github issues.<p>- It&#x27;s a tool to manage hosts. Which would make me think that &quot;reboot&quot; shouldn&#x27;t be a dirty word. But there&#x27;s actually no function to do (a) ```&#x2F;bin&#x2F;sh reboot```, (b) wait for it to come back. First request I found is four years old: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;513" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;513</a>. The current request has a nice summary of the cottage industry of &quot;blog articles that explain how to reboot &amp; wait&quot;: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;16186" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;ansible&#x2F;issues&#x2F;16186</a><p>- Projects are structured in a quite &quot;sparse&quot; folder structure. A small project usually has 25 files in 20 folders and 18 of them are &quot;main.yml&quot; which is probably a conspiracy to annoy me. The main feature an editor plugin for ansible needs is not syntax highlighting but &quot;use second-to-last folder name instead of filename on tabs&quot;.<p>-

How much more flapping there needs to be? Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Salt, Vagrant, Docker, CoreOS, runC, Kubernetes, OpenStack, the list goes on and on and on. People are going way, waaayyy out of their way just so they wouldn&#x27;t learn shell programmimg and how to build all this automation with OS packages. Is learning N amounts of discrete orchestration really easier and simpler than writing shell scripts and encapsulating them in OS packaging? Seriously?!?<p>Enough with the flapping and discrete solutions already!!!

Just a note that Upstart is Ubuntu-only and it&#x27;s actually going to be replaced by systemd.

I like the premise of this, but can someone link a more modern guide that deals with Docker, ECS, etc?

Why go through all this for a simple flask app (or even a more complicated one)? What do you gain over just using Elastic Beanstalk (which handles the monitoring&#x2F;autoscaling etc.)