Ansible

86 engineers on Hacker News describe using Ansible first-hand: 27 endorse it, 8 regret it, 3 are mixed.

73%trust
86first-hand users
72in production
endorse 27mixed 3regret 8uses, no opinion

“we replaced a mix of push-based Ansible, Salt, and Puppet with a fully pull-based Ansible system... It was lightning-fast and far easier to manage at a growing scale.”

mixed · production · skywhopper · 2025-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“The Ansible playbooks are your assets. Once you have them down and well-commented for a given service then re-deploying that service... becomes straightforward.”

endorse · production · adamcharnock · 2024-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“After corporate IT gives out a MacBook, we run a local-only Ansible script I wrote. ... It works well.”

endorse · production · bloopernova · 2024-08-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it takes about an hour to apply a change, because Ansible has to apply all the scripts each time.”

regret · production · splix · 2024-07-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I do not recommend Ansible as someone else did. You will spend your days fighting a mix of yaml and Jinja. Never again.”

regret · personal · exceptione · 2024-02-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Imagine a 3 hour Ansible-playbook execution, which randomly failed on different tasks, most of which got fixed by hitting <up><enter> until it applied...”

regret · production · cyberpunk · 2023-09-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We used to manage 500+ servers with Ansible for almost 10 years. It was a nightmare.”

regret · production · 10 yr · erenst · 2023-03-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Ansible to bootstrap k3s. It works, but we have to build a lot more stuff related to monitoring, alerting, routing, etc.”

endorse · production · ericxtang · 2021-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the services are containerized and run on servers that have been configured with Ansible, are horizontally scalable and have proper load balancing.”

endorse · production · KronisLV · 2021-11-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“upgrading a 20 node cluster is an hour long ansible run, or it was when we were using it”

regret · production · cyberpunk · 2021-07-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At one point, in a few weeks we replaced 20,000 lines of horribly low-level C++ custom client and server code with 1000 lines of Ansible scripts.”

endorse · production · benhoyt · 2021-06-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“If I wouldn't have stumbled over Ansible 6-7 years ago I would have left the industry already.”

endorse · personal · 6 yr · knowhy · 2020-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I love Ansible, and we migrated our Rails deployment from Chef to Ansible.”

endorse · production · pqdbr · 2020-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We wrote ansible playbooks to perform the heroku -> ec2 migration... (hadn't used ansible much before, I have to say, I'm a fan!”

endorse · production · mijoharas · 2020-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Terraform & Ansible don't require me to run a master server or have agents on every machine either.”

endorse · production · busterarm · 2020-10-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I started with ansible because the the server modules are good... But I'm leaving them (for aws components) because there's just no quality control on the releases.”

mixed · production · 2 yr · ldoughty · 2019-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the way that I use Ansible allows me to use the dynamic inventory feature (so... I don't store actual infra state on the automation)”

endorse · production · lewaldman · 2019-10-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Most that did chose Ansible, and all I ever heard from them was cursing on new systems and, between homework, constantly tweaking the deployment script.”

regret · personal · lucb1e · 2019-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I converted my dotfiles install bash script to use Ansible and to also install all my terminal dependencies.”

endorse · personal · bowlich · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Even our development instances are done using basically the same ansible setup as production (it catches more than I'd expect”

endorse · production · noir_lord · 2018-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have been using Ansible exclusively with Python 3 for over a year and only stumbled into incompatible code once, a simple case of string VS bytes literals that got quickly fixed.”

endorse · personal · 1 yr · guhcampos · 2017-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We basically did the same thing except we used Ansible for our templating... So far, it's worked out pretty well for us.”

endorse · production · howinator · 2017-08-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Ansible would never scale. We ditched it a long time ago.”

regret · production · doh · 2016-12-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Ansible filled this gap for us: we have a git repo per project, various playbooks for deployment/lifecycle-management of docker containers”

endorse · production · dexterbt1 · 2015-11-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“If you need a standardised provisioning system, start out with Ansible. It's pretty straight-forward.”

endorse · production · vacri · 2015-07-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Ansible works well for us, although we use it in a somewhat different way than most folks.”

endorse · production · emfree · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“on our site we run a match between ansible and docker (without coreos) and are very happy.”

endorse · production · merb · 2015-04-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use Ansible because it's simple to write recipes (they are just YAML files) and simple to deploy”

endorse · production · ngrilly · 2014-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“our experience has been that development on it is slow relative to the tool we use”

regret · production · zwischenzug · 2014-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I used Ansible and got up and running in 2 days... I dropped it all and went back to Ansible.”

endorse · personal · aleem · 2014-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I reuse about 80% of my playbooks between production and development”

endorse · production · kcorbitt · 2014-09-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We have a large set of well-tested ansible scripts that we use for deployment”

mixed · production · bryanlarsen · 2013-12-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the more I codify stuff in ansible, the more predictable things are when I go to provision/deploy in production.”

endorse · production · eyepulp · 2013-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've used ansible myself and it's far simpler than salt, and quicker to get started with.”

endorse · personal · ermintrude · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I use Ansible to deploy everything. It's been a joy and a lifesaver.”

endorse · production · StavrosK · 2013-11-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“at least its execution order is predictable. The easy learning curve for new colleagues and the compact syntax are also nice benefits.”

endorse · production · gwillem · 2013-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we save tons of times with Ansible and finish our works in PREDICTABLE fashions 100% of the times with little sweat.”

endorse · production · djatlantic · 2013-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I have an ansible playbook which I use to make sure that my different machines are all running the same applications”

endorse · personal · BadassFractal · 2013-11-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“My ansible playbook customizes so much already it wouldn't take too much more to just start from debian tbh.”

neutral · personal · ctmlr · 2026-11-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Ansible to configure live machines.”

neutral · production · hangrybear666 · 2026-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“information about ansible runs across our fleet”

neutral · production · linsomniac · 2026-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“AI tools managing our services using ansible/terraform”

neutral · production · cheema33 · 2026-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I use a lot of ansible for several of our deployments. At this point, most of that is managed via codex.”

neutral · production · jillesvangurp · 2026-05-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Some of our ansible integration tests would be 5 - 10 cents - and we run like 50 - 100 of those per day.”

neutral · production · tetha · 2025-12-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Claude reviewed our current Ansible code base and already highlighted a few errors”

neutral · production · rtp4me · 2025-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“One being Ansible and other being network segmentation.”

neutral · production · nirav72 · 2025-07-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“Eventually we moved to Ansible and I sold that business”

neutral · production · jasongill · 2025-05-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“deployed to VMs with ansible, so manual work to write the upgradeprocessfor me”

neutral · production · Tostino · 2024-10-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've been using #!/usr/bin/env -S ansible-playbook --diff to turn ansible playbooks to scripts”

neutral · personal · yjftsjthsd-h · 2023-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“why bother testing that ansible can write a variable into a file if the template is changed”

neutral · production · tetha · 2023-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“If you tried using ansible once a month without our host key certificates, you'd have ansible barf about a dozen unknown host keys”

neutral · production · tetha · 2023-09-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“or your ansible setup and reinstall it all.”

neutral · production · ohgodplsno · 2022-12-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've done EC2 auto-scaling with ansible and packer”

neutral · production · yashap · 2022-08-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“everything is glued together / configured / deployed via ansible.”

neutral · production · rudasn · 2021-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've included it in my ansible setup, so the basis, distro, os updates, firewalls, backups are cositent with my other servers.”

neutral · personal · berkes · 2021-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I've had similarly complicated problems with Terraform, Ansible, Chef and Puppet and just plain Linux as I have had with Kubernetes.”

neutral · personal · cameronh90 · 2021-09-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I maintain a fork of Ansible that has niceties like blocks you can loop over.”

neutral · production · Spivak · 2020-12-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“before I formalized in an ansible script”

neutral · production · tinco · 2020-11-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I tweak a number in Terraform templates and manually run the ansible playbook for each new server.”

neutral · production · erikrothoff · 2020-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I then lead another whole project to migrate the whole company to Git and Ansible for deploys.”

neutral · production · jarofgreen · 2020-03-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“configuration management? ansible / salt”

neutral · production · BrandoElFollito · 2019-12-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the deploy is invoked by ansible, whose own expect module recommends the real expect”

neutral · production · thyrsus · 2019-11-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use ansible-pull to decentralize our Ansible runs as much as possible, but we also use Hashicorp Vault's SSH Key Certificates functionality”

neutral · production · jturpin · 2019-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we use a mix of ansible tower (which I don't love) and ansible runs from local machines”

neutral · production · samvimes · 2019-11-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We've been using AWX (and Ansible Tower) for orchestrating our Ansible deployments and playbooks for a while now.”

neutral · production · viggeh · 2019-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“This is scaringly close to how we run geocod.io - right down to the ansible provisioning wrapper that I put together”

neutral · production · thecodemonkey · 2019-09-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the App team decided to go with Ansible while Unix Ops stuck with Puppet.”

neutral · production · simonh · 2019-04-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I learned and brought in production the followings: Ansible and Terraform”

neutral · production · apeacox · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I just use the same chef, puppet or ansible playbook I will use for a physical server”

neutral · production · vikrantrathore · 2018-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“At the moment we use Ansible but it runs over WinRM which is completely unreliable”

neutral · production · setquk · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“tons of terminal usage, Ansible, VMs, etc..”

neutral · production · nickjj · 2018-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We build on a continuous integration server and deploy using Ansible or AWS CodeDeploy.”

neutral · production · jake_morrison · 2018-05-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We migrated from Debian+Ansible to NixOS to easier be able to ensure consistency across servers.”

neutral · production · adamtulinius · 2018-04-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“You can build all of what I mentioned with OSS like: Ansible (deployment) Jenkins (ci) ELK stack (metrics / logging) Zabbix (system metrics)”

neutral · production · aprdm · 2017-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“it wants our Vault password to load the inventory, and the inventory task doesn't allow for associating vault credentials.”

neutral · production · linsomniac · 2017-10-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I can provision my machine using the ansible scripts we use to provision our production machines”

neutral · production · enjo · 2016-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“in this particular course we use Ansible to verify students' solutions.”

neutral · production · freetonik · 2016-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“ansible worked on them precisely once after initial install and then never again”

neutral · production · VLM · 2016-08-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“I'm not much of a sysadmin guy (developer-turned-Ansibleman)”

neutral · production · Ambroos · 2016-02-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“laid over some existing provisioning system like salt, ansible (or just a whole shit ton of puppet work)”

neutral · production · KirinDave · 2015-07-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“the Ansible playbook we use to launch the docker containers”

neutral · production · NathanKP · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“which is easy to manage with docker-compose, Ansible, etc.”

neutral · production · viktorbenei · 2015-07-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“We use multiple cloud providers (Digital Ocean and AWS being our primary), Play Framework, AKKA , Ansible for deployment, Shippable for our CI”

neutral · production · doppenhe · 2014-11-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“a whole bunch of ansible scripts to setup checks for postgres, nginx, etc.”

neutral · production · s0l1dsnak3123 · 2014-09-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“This is not stuff that great UX with Ansible will fix”

neutral · personal · lifeisstillgood · 2014-09-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?

“we've started experimenting with Ansible to perform simple setup of hosts”

neutral · personal · stevekemp · 2013-11-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?