Semaphore – Modern UI for Ansible

https://github.com/ansible-semaphore/semaphore

by cbrookins • 5 years ago

71 33 5 years ago

What do people use Ansible for that can't be done with Terraform and vice-versa?

tptacek2• 5 years ago

Terraform is not great at provisioning "inside" of Unix servers, and Ansible is not great at provisioning cloud resources.

xyzzy_plugh• 5 years ago

Yep. Terraform + Ansible or Puppet is the way to go.

jamesmishra• 5 years ago

Ansible comes with an ecosystem of collections and playbooks to help configure software. A lot of this configuration is hard to describe in Terraform's declarative way and the Terraform ecosystem generally avoids it.

hidden_sheepman• 5 years ago

Custom complex workflows

watsonkr• 5 years ago

I use both! Terraform builds the cloud resources and then hands it off to ansible for final provisioning.

cpitman2• 5 years ago

One more use case is that you sometime need to do something, not just specify idempotent configuration. For example, you might have a nightly task to run a script on multiple servers that dumps a data file, then copy those files to a central server.

Ansible can easily be used for both "I need to configure a thing" and also for "I need to script activity".

ghayes• 5 years ago

For example: I use terraform to create two EC2 nodes on a VPC and an ALB load balancer. Then I use Ansible to connect to those nodes and install Nginx and (re-)deploy my application code. If you're not going the route of full containerization, this is, in my opinion, the lowest common denominator set of provisioning tools and quite robust for nearly any workflow.

Arubis• 5 years ago

To answer your question pedantically, probably nothing; with enough time and effort, you could bend either tool to perform the general duties of the other. Terraform is capable of injecting and running shell scripts; Ansible can likewise interface with AWS and other cloud providers (or your own hardware). As sibling commenters have noted, that’s simply not the ideal primary use for each tool.

0xbadcafebee3• 5 years ago

It's so sad that these are the tools we have to work with. They are both so shitty, in such subtle ways, to the point that I tear my hair out once a week because of them. And the corporate IT world will never invest in development of truly free replacements just to make other people's lives easier. It's truly depressing.

emptysongglass2• 5 years ago

Terraform is fantastic. Mind explaining what your issues with it are?

kchr• 5 years ago

I am curious about your use case for these tools. What do you find them being so shitty at?

lazylizard• 5 years ago

most of the stuff we run is baremetal. this takes over after pxe; public key added with kickstart.

even for end-user desktops, this is somewhat useful. the facts give you a picture of what you have on your network.

but the web hosting and sql, yes containers..actually lxc.

cosmotic• 5 years ago

What does modern mean in this context?

cpitman2• 5 years ago

Reading through their website (https://ansible-semaphore.com/), it seems like it comes down to responsive UI with material design, and being written in Go.

It's not clear what this offers over Ansible AWX (https://github.com/ansible/awx), which is the traditional Ansible UI.

cbrookins• 5 years ago

AWX forces you to use Docker. Not a fan.

fiftin3• 5 years ago

Ansible Semaphore much easier than AWX (single binary file, no Docker required). It is much faster. It has Vue.js-based UI (AWX - jQuery).

sergiotapia• 5 years ago

I miss Ansible/Chef, yes I said it!

gscho• 5 years ago

I started using chef again recently and I love it. Feels great to use it again after being full k8s for a while.

senorsmile2• 5 years ago

I haven't heard about Semaphore in several years. It's good to hear about some healthy competition to tower/awx.

thayne• 5 years ago

The name is kind of ironic. A "modern ui" for something named after a high-tech science fiction communication device is named for an old low-tech communication method.

vkaku• 5 years ago

Looks like someone messed up that demo instance to be able to run ... bitcoin?

fiftin3• 5 years ago

Demo was hacked :) Currenlty it is ok

PebblesHD• 5 years ago

A slightly different question to sibling ~MuffinFlavored, what use case does this solve for that running ansible from your existing CI infrastructure doesn’t? If you’re at the scale where running from a laptop doesn’t work, wouldnt you already have some form of CI in place to get to the point of needing whatever role ansible is servicing?

peclink• 5 years ago

The most interesting concept is "Build & Deploy" and it's a pity that it isn't described even on conceptual level.

I think the "Build & Deploy" for configuration management is the right thing, but it looks like Ansible is not very good tool to implement it (and honestly, I don't know any mainstream tool that is really good at it).

I was trying to implement it as follows:

- part of a role is executed locally, building all the configuration files from templates (build); - configuration built locally is rsynced into dedicated directory on target server, deleting unnecessary files etc (sync); - part of a role is executed remotely, setting up symlinks from real configuration paths into synced dir and running all necessary actions (restarting services etc).

Yes, it's possible to write Ansible playbooks and roles that way, but in practice you are permanently struggling with the default Ansible playbooks and roles organizational structure.

I believe the only devops tool that really supports this style of things now is Nix and all the infrastructure around (and conceptually it's perfect, but in practice it has it's drawbacks).

fiftin3• 5 years ago

"Build & Deploy" under development (not available in stable version). Full documentation will be available after release.

Build - running locally. After building we have an artifact that can be uploaded to S3/Azure Storage/DO Spaces.

Deploy - running remotely on the target server(s). It downloads artifacts from storage and deploys them to the server.

Semaphore – Modern UI for Ansible

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