Yes the pub/sub model gets way faster than the Ansible push model, especially at scale : When you start having a few hundreds of servers, you'll see that you just spend so much time waiting for the playbook to run.
It's also heavily bound to network connectivity, if your server your reaching has 100ms of latency, every time Ansible does something, you will feel those 100ms.
In the case of Peekl, it's easy : The server will read the content from the local disk (depending on what roles you have, your groups, and also load the variables.) And simply sends the "compiled catalog" to your agent who will go through all of it and performs actions as needed.
An alternative to Ansible and Puppet, written in Golang.
It's called Peekl, and the idea behind it was to merge the two things I loved about both Ansible, and Puppet :
- The agent/server model of Puppet;
- The ease of writing Ansible code.
It also make sure to solve the problem that both Ansible and Puppet have in my sense :
- Puppet is a slow, decades old application. It's written in Ruby and run inside of a JVM for the server. Applying a catalog can be very long on complex configuration setup.
- Ansible on the other side works well, but the absence of an agent makes it hard to deploy stuff at scale : You being spending more time running your playbooks, than actually doing stuff.
So if you want to take a look at this alternative, head to the Github repository. Feel free to break it, open issues, and pull requests !
Yeah at beginning I really wanted to use HCL.. But their parser and implementing it was actually a little bit more difficult that doing just raw YAML parsing.
It also doesn't help that I'm not that familiar with the language.
I'm working on an alternative solution to Ansible and Puppet, trying to mix the best of both world: The pull-based aspect of Puppet, by having an agent running on nodes, and the simplicity of Ansible, by writing playbooks and roles.
It's called Peekl, and is available on Github. Tho it's still in what I'd called "alpha". Lot of new features to come!
Hi! I found that it was the most easy language to get started with. I looked at other language such as `HCL` (the Terraform language) but I thought that it would be too complex to learn, and to get started with. I really want this project to be easy to work with.
What language did you have in mind that you'd rather use compared to YAML ?
It's also heavily bound to network connectivity, if your server your reaching has 100ms of latency, every time Ansible does something, you will feel those 100ms.
In the case of Peekl, it's easy : The server will read the content from the local disk (depending on what roles you have, your groups, and also load the variables.) And simply sends the "compiled catalog" to your agent who will go through all of it and performs actions as needed.