
December 1, 2016
The single most frequent complain I hear about Ansible is about it’s slowness.
This is very common, but even more common among people that used to use Puppet.
There are many reasons why Ansible is slower than Puppet.
The three main reasons are:
- Linear execution: Ansible will execute each operation in order and will not run many steps at the same time as Puppet does.
- SSH Connection: all Ansible commands will be issued from the control system to the controlled system via SSH. On the other hand, in Puppet, all commands will be issued locally on the controlled host by the Puppet agent.
- Host limitation: since the Ansible Controller is involved with the process of applying changes to the controlled system, a limited number of systems can be changes at once.
Those limits come out from design decisions that preferred a simpler Playbook writing and a safer execution rather than speed.
There are some things that can be done to increase the performances of Ansible:
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October 30, 2016 - Milano, IT
From the 25th to the 27th of this month I’ve been at the SMAU in Milan (Italy).
The SMAU (Salone Macchine e Attrezzature per l’Ufficio, that would be Exposition of Machinery and Equipment for the Office) is an historical fair started in 1964 and that has had many changes over the years, for instance some years it has been opened to the general public, other times it was only for business visitors.
This year the event was targeted to business visitors.
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September 28, 2016
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This article deals with Ansible Tower <= 3.0. If you are looking for information around Ansible Tower >= 3.1, please look my newer article on the topic.
In the last few months I’ve setted up multiple times Ansible Tower, but I’ve noticed that there is not much documentation on how to perform basic maintenance on Ansible Tower High Availability setup, so I decided to write an article about it.
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July 11, 2016
Recently a customer asked me to help him debug an Ansible Playbook that was throwing a very generic error that was not helping at all.
The error was:
ERROR! Syntax Error while loading YAML.
As soon as I saw the error, I already guessed which problems could trigger such error: it’s either a bad usage of spaces, a badly escaped column within a value, or a variable escaping problem.
With a couple of grep
runs, I identified it as the variable escaping problem.
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