ara

Hey HN, long time lurker here. I humbly present ara which is a project I created back at Red Hat in 2016 (before AWX was open source) to make my life easier working with distributed and large scale Ansible playbooks. It is designed to be simple and compatible with however you're already running Ansible today without needing to change much of your existing workflows. My time and skills are limited but I have learned a lot and I am happy with how the project has steadily improved over the years with the much appreciated help of contributors. If you'd like to read more about the project, the blog might be interesting: https://ara.recordsansible.org/blog/ If you'd like to help, contribute or chat, feel free to hop on IRC, Slack or Matrix: https://ara.recordsansible.org/community/ The best way to stay up to date with the project is on Mastodon

It's healthy to look at alternatives, good on OP. I wanted to comment on a specific part that mentions that Ansible's YAML is a nightmare to debug. I wouldn't describe it like that but I'm biased because I've written ARA Records Ansible exactly to make playbooks easier to understand and troubleshoot: https://github.com/ansible-community/ara I've been using Ansible for many years in different contexts and I think it is easy to get into the trap of "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail". For me, Ansible shines as an excellent abstraction layer for supporting different operating systems or as a glue between different tools. I am very much a believer of using the right tool for the job. Ansible isn't always the answer and I think that's OK.