Avoid Ansible Galaxy (as default option)

 December 13, 2016

When I speak with people that are starting with Ansible from Puppet, the first thing they want to experiment is Ansible Galaxy.

This leaves me very sceptical, since I think the default mode in Ansible should be DIY. Since I’ve found myself in this situation far to many times, I decided to write down all the reasons why you should avoid Ansible Galaxy in the majority of situations.

Using Ansible Galaxy often violates the Ansible way. My interpretation of the Ansible Way, is do not do adopt overkill solution (also known as the classic “Keep It Simple Stupid” principle). Many times the Ansible Roles you can find in Ansible Galaxy are completely overkill because are created by people coming from the Puppet world (that has a completely different approach). Modules that install for you and configure NTP or Java for any possible distribution (and sometimes even different OS) means that you substitute a couple of Tasks with hundreds of lines of code. Often the majority of the code can be stripped because is not applicable to the specific environment.
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