{"slug": "ansible", "name": "Ansible", "category": "infra", "category_name": "Infrastructure and DevOps", "description": "Agentless open-source automation tool for configuration management, provisioning and deployment using YAML playbooks.", "recommenders": 11, "commenters": 44, "warners": 4, "score": 12.748, "rising": -3.6, "first": "2025-11-05", "latest": "2026-10-27", "why": "HN commenters use it to script reproducible server setups, from homelabs to work deployments, and some find it simpler to live with than Kubernetes.", "why_is_quote": false, "has_verdict": true, "sentiment": {"recommend": 12, "neutral": 32, "compare": 3, "warn": 4}, "spark": [1, 0, 2, 1, 0, 2, 2, 3, 1, 0, 0, 0], "listed": true, "loved": ["Versatile automation", "Works with AI agents"], "caveat": "Painful to use", "short_quote": "I use a lot of ansible for several of our deployments.", "icon": true, "domain": "ansible.com", "github_repo": null, "official_url": "https://www.ansible.com/", "pricing": "open source", "aliases": ["Ansible"], "verdict": [{"text": "HN commenters use it to script reproducible server setups,", "cites": [{"id": 751097217, "item_id": 46943576, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943576", "by": "jarofgreen", "date": "2026-02-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra.", "excerpt": "Hey, sorry it was hacked. You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/ Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a mat", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted server setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)"}, {"id": 733153776, "item_id": 45822111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822111", "by": "jwr", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers", "excerpt": "This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as \"cloud servers\" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun", "context": "runs own servers for many years, runs a business", "use_case": "server configuration and deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"}, {"id": 745206464, "item_id": 46575404, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575404", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server.", "excerpt": "I have a silly little internal website I use for bookmarks, searching internal tools, and some little utilities. I keep getting pressure to put it into our heavy and bespoke enterprise CICD process. I\u2019ve seen people quit over trying to onboard into this thing\u2026 more than one. It\u2019s complete overkill for my silly little site. My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server. It gets the", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying internal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: When has a \"dumb\" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?"}]}, {"text": " from homelabs to work deployments,", "cites": [{"id": 761297793, "item_id": 47581112, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581112", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-03-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Ansible to automate everything.", "excerpt": ">A lot of our week is made up of the same kinds of small tasks: provision a VM, tweak storage settings, pass through a device, replicate a dataset, share a file, test an image, throw the machine away, do it again. None of that is exciting. All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!! At no moment I heard automation, if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked. I run Proxmo", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "automating LXC deployments", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab"}, {"id": 778905552, "item_id": 48681597, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681597", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible makes everything like a walk in the park.", "excerpt": ">By moving to NixOS, my entire infrastructure is defined in text files. This means my AI agents can read, understand, and even safely modify my infrastructure You lost me there!! Firstly, NixOS is hype, like everything being moved to Rust and failing miserably. Secondly, \"AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure\", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those", "context": "homelab operator", "use_case": "infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 765058400, "item_id": 47816150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816150", "by": "osmandinc", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now, mainly to standardize and simplify the process across environments. Although 19.31 is around the corner and it\u2019s already time to move forward with the usual n-1 approach (19.30), I realized I never shared my updated playbooks for 19.28. The playbooks cover: Grid Infrastructure patching Database RU + MRP RAC environments Out-of-place patching They r", "context": "Oracle DBA", "use_case": "Oracle database patching", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Automated Oracle 19.28 Database and Grid Patching with Ansible"}, {"id": 752472000, "item_id": 47029500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029500", "by": "mathstuf", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible.", "excerpt": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible. Chocolatey installs the full Visual Studio and then we use the APIs provided to manage components via Ansible. See our action here: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/kitware/visualstudio/", "context": "CI maintainer", "use_case": "managing Visual Studio on CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Fixed Windows Native Development"}]}, {"text": " and some find it simpler to live with than Kubernetes.", "cites": [{"id": 776791761, "item_id": 48549485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549485", "by": "mickael-kerjean", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I spend much less time on infrastructure, sleeping betterat night and handling things like databases is much simpler", "excerpt": "I've had the opposite experience. I used to run k8s on bare metal, troubleshooting something at least once a month (DNS going down was a recurring favorite). The breaking point came with the churn in the ecosystem, got bitten by the deprecation of the community darling weave net cni plugin, the killing of the nginx ingress was the nail in the coffin knowing I had way too many annotation tight to the ingress that it w", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure management", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"}, {"id": 766030145, "item_id": 47876884, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876884", "by": "ianberdin", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible with some custom Linux tools fits better for Me.", "excerpt": "\u201cEverything is shit. Believe me. We will do something better, just believe me.\u201d Jokes aside: - k8s is insane peace of software. A right tool for a big problem. Not for your toys. Yes, it is crazy difficult to setup and manage. Then what? - cloud has bad and slow disk. BS. They have perfectly fast NVME. Something else? That\u2019s it. Why I am so confident? I used to setup and manage kubernetes for 2 years. I have some exp", "context": "builds own hosting for playcode.io", "use_case": "managing own hosting", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}]}, {"text": " The most common complaint is that it is painful to use, with YAML and testing singled out,", "cites": [{"id": 745564048, "item_id": 46597753, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597753", "by": "ornornor", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward", "excerpt": "About ansible: I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward (I use molecule in docker containers with geerlingguy\u2019s sp\u00e9cial images) What\u2019s your workflow for writing tested playbooks?", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ansible battle tested hardening for Linux, SSH, Nginx, MySQL"}, {"id": 746020592, "item_id": 46626287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46626287", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "excerpt": "> I can\u2019t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don\u2019t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion"}, {"id": 768140993, "item_id": 48008812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008812", "by": "ssddanbrown", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with.", "excerpt": "I've been using PyInfra for a while, albeit just for simple automation (Updating systems, checking certain stats) and I'm a big fan. Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with. Might just be a preference thing, but I always had trouble going through the Ansible docs. Ran into some bugs, like one machine that seems to cause errors and mess up the output on restart, alth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}]}, {"text": " and some see it as outdated next to immutable, container-based infrastructure.", "cites": [{"id": 790625984, "item_id": 49414124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49414124", "by": "skinfaxi", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible is obsolete because we moved from creating a machine and changing it to instantiating it with the changes we wanted.", "excerpt": "> Did Kubernetes kill Ansible? Kind of. I haven\u2019t written an Ansible playbook in years - if you handed me one right now I\u2019d be squinting at the module syntax like I\u2019d never seen it before - not because configuration management stopped mattering, but because Kubernetes made server management easy enough that we stopped building our own node images at all - we just use whatever the cloud provider hands us, an AWS AMI b", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI and Infrastructure Engineering"}, {"id": 796856369, "item_id": 49803523, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803523", "by": "purpleidea", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence", "excerpt": "I'd love to give someone at Verda a demo of https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ to show them how they could actually do fast provisioning and automation. Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence that they're innovating in building their core infra. You can't out-compete AWS or even the smaller clouds there. If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure provisioning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B"}]}], "praise": [{"label": "Versatile automation", "summary": "Used for a wide range of jobs, from Oracle patching and Visual Studio on CI machines to Route53 records and GitLab runners.", "quotes": [{"id": 765058400, "item_id": 47816150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816150", "by": "osmandinc", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now, mainly to standardize and simplify the process across environments. Although 19.31 is around the corner and it\u2019s already time to move forward with the usual n-1 approach (19.30), I realized I never shared my updated playbooks for 19.28. The playbooks cover: Grid Infrastructure patching Database RU + MRP RAC environments Out-of-place patching They r", "context": "Oracle DBA", "use_case": "Oracle database patching", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Automated Oracle 19.28 Database and Grid Patching with Ansible"}, {"id": 752472000, "item_id": 47029500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029500", "by": "mathstuf", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible.", "excerpt": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible. Chocolatey installs the full Visual Studio and then we use the APIs provided to manage components via Ansible. See our action here: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/kitware/visualstudio/", "context": "CI maintainer", "use_case": "managing Visual Studio on CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Fixed Windows Native Development"}, {"id": 789410769, "item_id": 49338173, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338173", "by": "tikkabhuna", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Simple Ansible script to deploy the runner and register it.", "excerpt": "Really? I've been very happy with how easy GitLab Runners are to manage. We were running 20,000 jobs a week on 6 bare metal boxes and we had tons of spare capacity. Simple Ansible script to deploy the runner and register it. Tags for t-shirt sizes to set the amount of CPU/memory allocated to each job container. Maybe running on Kubernetes or some autoscaling solution is more painful.", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying CI runners", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"}]}, {"label": "Works with AI agents", "summary": "Commenters have AI agents write and run their playbooks, and one notes LLMs likely know Ansible well.", "quotes": [{"id": 783580065, "item_id": 48973754, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48973754", "by": "hk1337", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.", "excerpt": "I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.", "context": "", "use_case": "managing router configuration", "switched_from": "", "story": "HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router"}, {"id": 765173714, "item_id": 47823357, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823357", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-04-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I managed the whole migration via Codex orchestrating my Ansible scripts.", "excerpt": "I migrated from Google Cloud to Hetner beginning of March. I currently have about 9 vms running and I pay a around 130 euro per month. There are very little other fees and generous freemiums for things like networking and storage. I have 3 projects, one LB, a handful of storage buckets, and a private network in one of the projects. That 130 is for everything. Their 40% price increase kicked in shortly after I signed ", "context": "", "use_case": "migration automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime"}, {"id": 768142448, "item_id": 48008903, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008903", "by": "appplication", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I imagine LLMs are probably a little more proficient at ansible just due to volume of training data", "excerpt": "The is cool, thank you for sharing. I was just thinking about onboarding to ansible since I\u2019ve just been following a manual checklist of commands for my remote server but based on positive feedback here I\u2019ll probs oh give this a shot. Only downside is I imagine LLMs are probably a little more proficient at ansible just due to volume of training data.", "context": "", "use_case": "remote server setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}]}, {"label": "Reproducible rebuilds", "summary": "Scripted setups let commenters rebuild a server from a fresh OS in minutes.", "quotes": [{"id": 751097217, "item_id": 46943576, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943576", "by": "jarofgreen", "date": "2026-02-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra.", "excerpt": "Hey, sorry it was hacked. You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/ Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a mat", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted server setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)"}, {"id": 733153776, "item_id": 45822111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822111", "by": "jwr", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers", "excerpt": "This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as \"cloud servers\" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun", "context": "runs own servers for many years, runs a business", "use_case": "server configuration and deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"}, {"id": 745206464, "item_id": 46575404, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575404", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server.", "excerpt": "I have a silly little internal website I use for bookmarks, searching internal tools, and some little utilities. I keep getting pressure to put it into our heavy and bespoke enterprise CICD process. I\u2019ve seen people quit over trying to onboard into this thing\u2026 more than one. It\u2019s complete overkill for my silly little site. My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server. It gets the", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying internal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: When has a \"dumb\" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?"}]}, {"label": "Homelab automation", "summary": "Homelab users automate their Proxmox containers and services with it.", "quotes": [{"id": 761297793, "item_id": 47581112, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581112", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-03-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Ansible to automate everything.", "excerpt": ">A lot of our week is made up of the same kinds of small tasks: provision a VM, tweak storage settings, pass through a device, replicate a dataset, share a file, test an image, throw the machine away, do it again. None of that is exciting. All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!! At no moment I heard automation, if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked. I run Proxmo", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "automating LXC deployments", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab"}, {"id": 778905552, "item_id": 48681597, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681597", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible makes everything like a walk in the park.", "excerpt": ">By moving to NixOS, my entire infrastructure is defined in text files. This means my AI agents can read, understand, and even safely modify my infrastructure You lost me there!! Firstly, NixOS is hype, like everything being moved to Rust and failing miserably. Secondly, \"AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure\", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those", "context": "homelab operator", "use_case": "infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 802694513, "item_id": 50168407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168407", "by": "pdpi", "date": "2026-10-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "enough Ansible that I understand the fundamentals", "excerpt": "> Linus Torvalds recently said he uses AI to develop Java GUIs because he doesn't know how to write Java GUIs Given the quality of the output when I ask it to do things I do know how to do, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of using AI to do things I don't know how to do myself. It reeks of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I have a slightly more nuanced take on it \u2014 I use Claude to write Ansible playbooks f", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "homelab server management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Getting Banned from r/java"}]}, {"label": "Simpler than Kubernetes", "summary": "Commenters who left Kubernetes report spending less time on infrastructure with Ansible.", "quotes": [{"id": 776791761, "item_id": 48549485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549485", "by": "mickael-kerjean", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I spend much less time on infrastructure, sleeping betterat night and handling things like databases is much simpler", "excerpt": "I've had the opposite experience. I used to run k8s on bare metal, troubleshooting something at least once a month (DNS going down was a recurring favorite). The breaking point came with the churn in the ecosystem, got bitten by the deprecation of the community darling weave net cni plugin, the killing of the nginx ingress was the nail in the coffin knowing I had way too many annotation tight to the ingress that it w", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure management", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"}, {"id": 766030145, "item_id": 47876884, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876884", "by": "ianberdin", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible with some custom Linux tools fits better for Me.", "excerpt": "\u201cEverything is shit. Believe me. We will do something better, just believe me.\u201d Jokes aside: - k8s is insane peace of software. A right tool for a big problem. Not for your toys. Yes, it is crazy difficult to setup and manage. Then what? - cloud has bad and slow disk. BS. They have perfectly fast NVME. Something else? That\u2019s it. Why I am so confident? I used to setup and manage kubernetes for 2 years. I have some exp", "context": "builds own hosting for playcode.io", "use_case": "managing own hosting", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}]}, {"label": "Reusable roles", "summary": "Existing roles, such as Jeff Geerling's and a Quadlet role, are described as pleasant and working well.", "quotes": [{"id": 743540866, "item_id": 46471304, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471304", "by": "_mig5", "date": "2026-01-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "many of the existing roles out there are a lot more pleasant/easier to read (especially Jeff Geerling's). I still use those myself day to day.", "excerpt": "Thanks for the comment and questions! Very wise. Let me break it down as to what harvest does: 1) Detects the OS and its package backend (e.g dpkg vs rpm etc) 2) Detects what packages are installed 3) For each package, it tries to detect files in /etc/ that have been modified from the default that get shipped with the package . It does't walk the whole filesystem, it looks straight in /etc for stuff here. 4) It detec", "context": "", "use_case": "config management", "switched_from": "", "story": null}, {"id": 768421650, "item_id": 48026353, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026353", "by": "stryan", "date": "2026-05-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible has a dedicated Quadlet role that works pretty well", "excerpt": "> Having your whole application with its containers, volumes, and networks all defined together in one easy-to-read YAML file is a way better experience. Deployment is two steps: 1. `git clone foo` 2. `docker compose up -d`. You can see the state of the application containers with `docker compose ps`. You can run multiple compose applications on the same host and manage them separately by putting them in different di", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying quadlets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?"}]}], "caveats": [{"label": "Painful to use", "summary": "Some find it frustrating to use, citing YAML, testing that is not straightforward, and a 'dirty' feel.", "quotes": [{"id": 745564048, "item_id": 46597753, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597753", "by": "ornornor", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward", "excerpt": "About ansible: I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward (I use molecule in docker containers with geerlingguy\u2019s sp\u00e9cial images) What\u2019s your workflow for writing tested playbooks?", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ansible battle tested hardening for Linux, SSH, Nginx, MySQL"}, {"id": 746020592, "item_id": 46626287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46626287", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "excerpt": "> I can\u2019t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don\u2019t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion"}, {"id": 776791761, "item_id": 48549485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549485", "by": "mickael-kerjean", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I spend much less time on infrastructure, sleeping betterat night and handling things like databases is much simpler", "excerpt": "I've had the opposite experience. I used to run k8s on bare metal, troubleshooting something at least once a month (DNS going down was a recurring favorite). The breaking point came with the churn in the ecosystem, got bitten by the deprecation of the community darling weave net cni plugin, the killing of the nginx ingress was the nail in the coffin knowing I had way too many annotation tight to the ingress that it w", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure management", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"}]}, {"label": "Hard docs", "summary": "One commenter found the docs, syntax and usage patterns harder than PyInfra's.", "quotes": [{"id": 768140993, "item_id": 48008812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008812", "by": "ssddanbrown", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with.", "excerpt": "I've been using PyInfra for a while, albeit just for simple automation (Updating systems, checking certain stats) and I'm a big fan. Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with. Might just be a preference thing, but I always had trouble going through the Ansible docs. Ran into some bugs, like one machine that seems to cause errors and mess up the output on restart, alth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}]}, {"label": "Scaling limits", "summary": "On large, fast-changing fleets, deploy time is bound by network round trips and node count, and Python must be present on managed nodes.", "quotes": [{"id": 792133969, "item_id": 49508373, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508373", "by": "redat00", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Peekl is an alternative to Ansible, but would probably not be as good as an alternative for small individuals/companies", "excerpt": "Hi! Some companies do use Ansible at an higher usage level, on big infrastructure, and where change iterations happens quickly. In this context the Ansible model might not scale well : Your deployment time is bound by both the network you're using to contact the nodes you're managing, where you literally feel any round-trip your packets have to make, and by the number of nodes you have to perform actions on (which is", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Peekl: An Alternative to Puppet and Ansible"}]}, {"label": "Seen as outdated", "summary": "Some argue immutable images and Kubernetes have made mutable configuration management obsolete.", "quotes": [{"id": 790625984, "item_id": 49414124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49414124", "by": "skinfaxi", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible is obsolete because we moved from creating a machine and changing it to instantiating it with the changes we wanted.", "excerpt": "> Did Kubernetes kill Ansible? Kind of. I haven\u2019t written an Ansible playbook in years - if you handed me one right now I\u2019d be squinting at the module syntax like I\u2019d never seen it before - not because configuration management stopped mattering, but because Kubernetes made server management easy enough that we stopped building our own node images at all - we just use whatever the cloud provider hands us, an AWS AMI b", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI and Infrastructure Engineering"}, {"id": 796856369, "item_id": 49803523, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803523", "by": "purpleidea", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence", "excerpt": "I'd love to give someone at Verda a demo of https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ to show them how they could actually do fast provisioning and automation. Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence that they're innovating in building their core infra. You can't out-compete AWS or even the smaller clouds there. If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure provisioning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B"}]}, {"label": "Slow full rebuilds", "summary": "Rebuilding systems from a playbook is too slow compared with restoring backups at scale.", "quotes": [{"id": 799465730, "item_id": 49966608, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966608", "by": "kbenson", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook", "excerpt": "You've missed the point. It doesn't matter that you can rebuild the system exactly, the example in question had little to do with how accurate the restores were, it had to do with the time to reinstall. I too can entirely rebuild many systems simple from kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook. Do I want to? No, that's too slow, and I might be doing this operation for tens or hundreds of systems. We h", "context": "sysadmin managing many systems", "use_case": "rebuilding systems", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Tao of Backup"}]}], "who": [{"by": "pdpi", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168407", "date": "2026-10-20"}, {"by": "chanux", "context": "few go binaries on a server", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50117066", "date": "2026-10-16"}, {"by": "caivi", "context": "AI-powered forward engineer looking for work", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081293", "date": "2026-10-14"}, {"by": "h4kunamata", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50064021", "date": "2026-10-12"}, {"by": "kbenson", "context": "sysadmin managing many systems", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966608", "date": "2026-10-05"}, {"by": "quipacorn", "context": "infrastructure engineer with a physics PhD", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958852", "date": "2026-10-04"}, {"by": "skydhash", "context": "self-hosts software for a single user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210283", "date": "2026-08-07"}, {"by": "darkurtpanke", "context": "systems programmer seeking work", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164278", "date": "2026-08-03"}, {"by": "whalesalad", "context": "homelab user", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680588", "date": "2026-06-25"}, {"by": "ianberdin", "context": "builds own hosting for playcode.io", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876884", "date": "2026-04-23"}, {"by": "osmandinc", "context": "Oracle DBA", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816150", "date": "2026-04-18"}, {"by": "LANcaster", "context": "Linux sysadmin/DevOps with 20+ years experience", "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356043", "date": "2026-03-12"}], "tags": ["for homelabs", "for self-hosters", "for bare-metal servers", "pairs with Terraform", "for network automation"], "use_cases": ["configuration management", "homelab configuration management", "migration automation", "provisioning ssh keys", "configuring hosts", "homelab server management"], "compared": [{"slug": "kubernetes", "name": "Kubernetes", "co": 5, "switched_from": 2, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "pyinfra", "name": "pyinfra", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 2}, {"slug": "terraform", "name": "Terraform", "co": 7, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "codex", "name": "Codex", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "proxmox", "name": "Proxmox", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "docker", "name": "Docker", "co": 5, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "claude", "name": "Claude", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}, {"slug": "puppet", "name": "Puppet", "co": 4, "switched_from": 0, "switched_to": 0}], "makers": [], "threads": [{"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48679385", "title": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008083", "title": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out", "mentions": 3}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49922568", "title": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)", "mentions": 2}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50264857", "title": "Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50202681", "title": "Docker is weird", "mentions": 1}, {"url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50167524", "title": "Getting Banned from r/java", "mentions": 1}], "sentiment_by_month": {"2025-11": {"recommend": 1}, "2025-12": {"neutral": 1}, "2026-01": {"neutral": 2, "recommend": 2, "warn": 2}, "2026-02": {"recommend": 1, "neutral": 1}, "2026-03": {"neutral": 4}, "2026-04": {"recommend": 2, "neutral": 1}, "2026-05": {"compare": 2, "neutral": 1, "recommend": 2}, "2026-06": {"neutral": 7, "recommend": 3}, "2026-07": {"neutral": 1, "recommend": 1}, "2026-08": {"neutral": 4, "warn": 1, "compare": 1}, "2026-09": {"warn": 1}, "2026-10": {"neutral": 10}}, "quotes": [{"id": 804266737, "item_id": 50266671, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50266671", "by": "scoodah", "date": "2026-10-27", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "we provision ssh keys on a box with ansible", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve used tailscale in quite a few jobs now and not one have we used tailscale ssh. Call us old school or whatever but at my current place of employment we provision ssh keys on a box with ansible and just use regular old ssh over the tailnet, not tailscale ssh", "context": "", "use_case": "provisioning SSH keys", "switched_from": "", "story": "Tailscale SSH: Investigation and remediation update"}, {"id": 803418626, "item_id": 50213664, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50213664", "by": "cloudyporpoise", "date": "2026-10-23", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "building with terraform \\ ansible", "excerpt": "I see less and less of a need for Docker when running simple linux hosts and building with terraform \\ ansible. For any codebase with dep management it is great and I still prefer building code through Docker but that's about all I use it for.", "context": "", "use_case": "configuring hosts", "switched_from": "", "story": "Docker is weird"}, {"id": 802694513, "item_id": 50168407, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50168407", "by": "pdpi", "date": "2026-10-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "enough Ansible that I understand the fundamentals", "excerpt": "> Linus Torvalds recently said he uses AI to develop Java GUIs because he doesn't know how to write Java GUIs Given the quality of the output when I ask it to do things I do know how to do, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of using AI to do things I don't know how to do myself. It reeks of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. I have a slightly more nuanced take on it \u2014 I use Claude to write Ansible playbooks f", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "homelab server management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Getting Banned from r/java"}, {"id": 801873057, "item_id": 50117066, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50117066", "by": "chanux", "date": "2026-10-16", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I ended up going with Ansible to set things up", "excerpt": "Quadlets looked super interesting when I stumbled upon it. However it still felt too much for my \"few go binaries thrown on a server\" setup. I ended up going with Ansible to set things up (and of course I use systemd).", "context": "few go binaries on a server", "use_case": "server configuration", "switched_from": "", "story": "What I self-host"}, {"id": 801570178, "item_id": 50098136, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50098136", "by": "whalesalad", "date": "2026-10-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Making changes is done via a mix of one off tooling, ansible and terraform.", "excerpt": "Why not both? My entire home network (dns, zfs nas, subnets, kube, proxmox hosts, ipa domain, its overkill homeprod) is represented by a git repo. Docs, plans, scripts to bootstrap nodes to domain join, kube config, proxmox tooling, ipa as code, nas as code, cert management, my own ec2 as a service, etc. Making changes is done via a mix of one off tooling, ansible and terraform. I use Claude or codex to manage the en", "context": "", "use_case": "homelab configuration", "switched_from": "", "story": "Running Windows desktop tests from Linux with disposable VMs"}, {"id": 801514962, "item_id": 50094685, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50094685", "by": "hangrybear666", "date": "2026-10-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "also Ansible to configure live machines", "excerpt": "Oh that's neat. Yeah I got started on heroku too. Fly.io also comes to mind. We run our own gitlab instance in a central AWS account that has some infra buckets containing modularized Terraform packaged into tarballs that are then fanned out to a couple hundred aws accounts across the teams and environments (prod, qual, dev). Its all deployed via gitlab ci cd pipelines (which are just ec2 instances spawned at pipelin", "context": "", "use_case": "configuring live machines", "switched_from": "", "story": "Neckbeard \u2013 A DevOps/platform/SRE plugin for your agent"}, {"id": 801300692, "item_id": 50081293, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50081293", "by": "caivi", "date": "2026-10-14", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "TypeScript, Ansible, Postgres, Supabase/Neon/Render", "excerpt": "Location: Minneapolis, MN, USA Remote: Yes Willing to relocate: No Technologies: Opencode / Codex / Jcode, Tmux, Docker, Python, Node, TypeScript, Ansible, Postgres, Supabase/Neon/Render, automated CI / CD test pipelines, Sentry, FastAPI, Express/Hono R\u00e9sum\u00e9/CV: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1swpa5LInVdPEtjhhwxFWGsge8K5... Email: christopherisler1@gmail.com Portfolio: https://github.com/chrisisler - AI-powered forw", "context": "AI-powered forward engineer looking for work", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 801024338, "item_id": 50064021, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50064021", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-10-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I run Proxmox LXC containers at home managed via Ansible.", "excerpt": "Disagree. I run Proxmox LXC containers at home managed via Ansible. I used Claude to assist me getting 4 services I was not familiar with working, draft the configuration, the firewall rule so all the traffic goes via a VPN and not my home network. 2 days and got everything working. It took away what would have taken me a week reading posts after posts. Know that it is a tool to assist you and you will learn a lot fr", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "managing home containers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Using AI for just 10 minutes erodes your ability to persist at hard things"}, {"id": 799465730, "item_id": 49966608, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49966608", "by": "kbenson", "date": "2026-10-05", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook", "excerpt": "You've missed the point. It doesn't matter that you can rebuild the system exactly, the example in question had little to do with how accurate the restores were, it had to do with the time to reinstall. I too can entirely rebuild many systems simple from kickstarting a new one and applying an ansible playbook. Do I want to? No, that's too slow, and I might be doing this operation for tens or hundreds of systems. We h", "context": "sysadmin managing many systems", "use_case": "rebuilding systems", "switched_from": "", "story": "The Tao of Backup"}, {"id": 799341632, "item_id": 49958852, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958852", "by": "quipacorn", "date": "2026-10-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've built Ansible automation for provisioning and maintenance", "excerpt": "Location: Washington, US (Pacific Northwest) Remote: Yes (preferred) Willing to relocate: For the right role, though I prefer to remain in the PNW Technologies: * Infrastructure: Linux (Rocky/Debian/Arch), Kubernetes, Docker, Ansible, NGINX, GitHub Actions / CI/CD * Systems and networking: DNS (BIND/TinyDNS), Kea DHCP, NetBox, Zabbix, Harvester, Ceph * Cloud and hardware: Hetzner, AWS, colocated/on-prem bare metal * ", "context": "infrastructure engineer with a physics PhD", "use_case": "provisioning and maintenance automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2026)"}, {"id": 796856369, "item_id": 49803523, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49803523", "by": "purpleidea", "date": "2026-09-22", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence", "excerpt": "I'd love to give someone at Verda a demo of https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ to show them how they could actually do fast provisioning and automation. Seeing Ansible+Kubernetes+K* stuff in their jobs offering does not inspire confidence that they're innovating in building their core infra. You can't out-compete AWS or even the smaller clouds there. If you want to see a different perspective, lmk.", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure provisioning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B"}, {"id": 792133969, "item_id": 49508373, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508373", "by": "redat00", "date": "2026-08-31", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Peekl is an alternative to Ansible, but would probably not be as good as an alternative for small individuals/companies", "excerpt": "Hi! Some companies do use Ansible at an higher usage level, on big infrastructure, and where change iterations happens quickly. In this context the Ansible model might not scale well : Your deployment time is bound by both the network you're using to contact the nodes you're managing, where you literally feel any round-trip your packets have to make, and by the number of nodes you have to perform actions on (which is", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Peekl: An Alternative to Puppet and Ansible"}, {"id": 790625984, "item_id": 49414124, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49414124", "by": "skinfaxi", "date": "2026-08-24", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible is obsolete because we moved from creating a machine and changing it to instantiating it with the changes we wanted.", "excerpt": "> Did Kubernetes kill Ansible? Kind of. I haven\u2019t written an Ansible playbook in years - if you handed me one right now I\u2019d be squinting at the module syntax like I\u2019d never seen it before - not because configuration management stopped mattering, but because Kubernetes made server management easy enough that we stopped building our own node images at all - we just use whatever the cloud provider hands us, an AWS AMI b", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "AI and Infrastructure Engineering"}, {"id": 789410769, "item_id": 49338173, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338173", "by": "tikkabhuna", "date": "2026-08-17", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Simple Ansible script to deploy the runner and register it.", "excerpt": "Really? I've been very happy with how easy GitLab Runners are to manage. We were running 20,000 jobs a week on 6 bare metal boxes and we had tons of spare capacity. Simple Ansible script to deploy the runner and register it. Tags for t-shirt sizes to set the amount of CPU/memory allocated to each job container. Maybe running on Kubernetes or some autoscaling solution is more painful.", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying CI runners", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub"}, {"id": 787364528, "item_id": 49210283, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49210283", "by": "skydhash", "date": "2026-08-07", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "maybe use ansible for scripting the provisioning and deploy", "excerpt": "All of those requirements seem weird. I selfhost a few software and the user count is one. My extent at sysadmin is to write a systemd service, configure the proxy (if it\u2019s on a vps and I use subdomains), and maybe use ansible for scripting the provisioning and deploy. It\u2019s fine to publish recommendations how to tune configurations for specific usages. But I only need the app, not the various things that you may thin", "context": "self-hosts software for a single user", "use_case": "provisioning and deploy scripting", "switched_from": "", "story": "The web server deployment model breaks at hobby scale"}, {"id": 786628451, "item_id": 49164278, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49164278", "by": "darkurtpanke", "date": "2026-08-03", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "Ansible.", "excerpt": "Location:Cape town. Remote: Yes. Obviously. I don\u2019t do office culture. I prefer quiet dark room with a 4K monitor and a mechanical keyboard. Willing to relocate: Only if the relocation involves a data center, a hackerspace, or a country with no extradition treaties. Otherwise, no. Technologies:Go, Rust, C, C++., Docker, FreeBSD, and I once fixed a mainframe. Don\u2019t ask how. MongoDB, I\u2019ve written my own key value store", "context": "systems programmer seeking work", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (August 2026)"}, {"id": 786381840, "item_id": 49148865, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49148865", "by": "limagnolia", "date": "2026-08-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use Ansible or Pyinfra more recently to accomplish these sorts of tasks.", "excerpt": "I use Ansible or Pyinfra more recently to accomplish these sorts of tasks. Not quite the same concept, but I think it accomplishes the same goal for me.", "context": "", "use_case": "machine configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Show HN: Bor \u2013 Open-source policy management for Linux desktops"}, {"id": 783580065, "item_id": 48973754, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48973754", "by": "hk1337", "date": "2026-07-19", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.", "excerpt": "I used claude to manage an ansible playbook for managing the mikrotik router. That way I can see the changes being done.", "context": "", "use_case": "managing router configuration", "switched_from": "", "story": "HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router"}, {"id": 780906262, "item_id": 48806641, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48806641", "by": "canntstand", "date": "2026-07-06", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker containers", "excerpt": "Hi everyone! I wanted to share a project I\u2019ve been working on called ServeHub-2. It\u2019s designed as an out-of-the-box solution for anyone looking for a ready-to-use, hybrid self-hosted architecture with a complete monitoring and backup system. The project is tailored for Ubuntu, Debian, and Arch Linux. GitHub Repository: https://github.com/canntstand/ServeHub-2 I completely automated the setup via Ansible, Docker conta", "context": "", "use_case": "setup automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "I built an out-of-the-box self-hosting infrastructure. How can I improve it?"}, {"id": 778907122, "item_id": 48681695, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681695", "by": "pxc", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I've used Ansible and Puppet at previous jobs.", "excerpt": "> Firstly, NixOS is hype NixOS is more than 20 years old, and virtually all of the things that make it compelling were already present a decade ago. If it's not for you, you'll know after you give it a try. But for those for whom it clicks, it's desirable because it just provides a more enjoyable computing experience. It's not more complicated than that. > Secondly, \"AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure\", ", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 778905552, "item_id": 48681597, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48681597", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible makes everything like a walk in the park.", "excerpt": ">By moving to NixOS, my entire infrastructure is defined in text files. This means my AI agents can read, understand, and even safely modify my infrastructure You lost me there!! Firstly, NixOS is hype, like everything being moved to Rust and failing miserably. Secondly, \"AI ... can .... safely modify my infrastructure\", OP is either being a troll or haven't seem how the whole IT world is upside down because of those", "context": "homelab operator", "use_case": "infrastructure as code", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 778889412, "item_id": 48680588, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48680588", "by": "whalesalad", "date": "2026-06-25", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "inherits a lot of policy from FreeIPA and/or Ansible config", "excerpt": "I haven't abandoned Proxmox yet, but the take here resonates with me. I do not like configuring appliances. I prefer defining infra as code, having that diffable, assertable, etc. I have had pretty good luck managing Proxmox clusters with the Proxmox API (https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/api-viewer/index.html) or just letting the agent shell in as root (lol). I built a very simple provisioning tool called vmfactory t", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "homelab configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from Proxmox to NixOS and Incus"}, {"id": 777759458, "item_id": 48609966, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48609966", "by": "gsliepen", "date": "2026-06-20", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "let another tool like Ansible take over the rest of the provisioning", "excerpt": "Nice, although if you already are running your own DHCP and web server, it's very easy to add a TFTP server and configure everything to serve whatever you want. So it does feel a bit like reinventing the wheel to me. A PXE boot server has many uses. The project already mentions using it for tools like GParted, Memtest86+ and so on. Booting live OS or OS installers via netboot.xyz is also great. But you can automate t", "context": "", "use_case": "machine provisioning", "switched_from": "", "story": "Bootimus \u2013 A Self-Contained PXE and HTTP Boot Server"}, {"id": 777423842, "item_id": 48588990, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48588990", "by": "guhcampos", "date": "2026-06-18", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "then tried Ansible", "excerpt": "I used stow for a long time, then tried Ansible, but eventually settled into good old Make. `make dotfiles` just creates a bunch of symlinks, takes 5 minutes, all good and happy. Everything is modular, declarative, simple. Never looked back.", "context": "", "use_case": "dotfile management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi"}, {"id": 776791761, "item_id": 48549485, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48549485", "by": "mickael-kerjean", "date": "2026-06-15", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I spend much less time on infrastructure, sleeping betterat night and handling things like databases is much simpler", "excerpt": "I've had the opposite experience. I used to run k8s on bare metal, troubleshooting something at least once a month (DNS going down was a recurring favorite). The breaking point came with the churn in the ecosystem, got bitten by the deprecation of the community darling weave net cni plugin, the killing of the nginx ingress was the nail in the coffin knowing I had way too many annotation tight to the ingress that it w", "context": "", "use_case": "infrastructure management", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "What job interviews taught me about Kubernetes"}, {"id": 775947490, "item_id": 48496718, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48496718", "by": "klodolph", "date": "2026-06-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "which I manage using Terraform and Ansible (I am happy with these)", "excerpt": "I\u2019m not sure what I would get out of nix-Darwin. It looks like it does not solve any of the problems I am trying to solve? I don\u2019t need or want configuration management on my personal systems, except for the web servers, which I manage using Terraform and Ansible (I am happy with these). We use Nix at work for all sorts of stuff. Binaries run in production from Nix paths. Software we build has dependencies in Nix. Pe", "context": "", "use_case": "managing web servers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Homebrew 6.0.0"}, {"id": 775382897, "item_id": 48461431, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48461431", "by": "linsomniac", "date": "2026-06-09", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "our normal ansible automation", "excerpt": "The Ubuntu DDoS drove me to build a new apt-cacher with two goals: be able to supply typical packages when the upstream is unavailable and be more reliable than the existing apt-cacher/apt-cacher-ng. It's looking like I'll be doing a 1.0 release next week (it's been in beta for ~3 weeks). https://github.com/linsomniac/apt-cacher-ultra We do ground-up respins of half of our dev+stg cluster every morning, to test our a", "context": "", "use_case": "dev/stg cluster automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What are tools you have made for yourself since the advent of AI"}, {"id": 775094321, "item_id": 48443395, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48443395", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-06-08", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I currently have a simple Ansible playbook for it on RHEL.", "excerpt": "I generally just use Apache. A classic LAMP setup, if a DB is needed for anything. If no DB is needed, I guess it\u2019s just LAP This is pretty quick and painless to setup. SLES had a single command for it back when I used it, if I remember correctly. I currently have a simple Ansible playbook for it on RHEL. It\u2019s certainly much more straightforward than deploying Flask to production, especially if just using the default", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying LAMP setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Learn PHP in 2026 (Yes, Really)"}, {"id": 773932593, "item_id": 48370787, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48370787", "by": "kayson", "date": "2026-06-02", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "all of my ansible-deployed cron jobs", "excerpt": "I love systemd timers! I've slowly moved all of my ansible-deployed cron jobs to timers (now just an ansible copy!). The integration with journalctl, especially in a newer OS like Debian 13 where syslog is gone, is really nice. It's also really nice to be able to start the service manually for debug. Having a cron job that didn't work was an annoying exercise in copy/pasting or writing an extra shell script. Don't ev", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying jobs", "switched_from": "", "story": "You Don't Love Systemd Timers Enough"}, {"id": 772469841, "item_id": 48279365, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48279365", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-05-26", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use a lot of ansible for several of our deployments.", "excerpt": "I've been against self hosting internal tools for a long time mainly because of the devops and other overhead. But AI based devops makes it so easy now to spin up whatever you want now that I'm reconsidering that. I use a lot of ansible for several of our deployments. At this point, most of that is managed via codex. For Git, all you technically need is ssh access and some backup strategy for your server. It would be", "context": "", "use_case": "deployments", "switched_from": "", "story": "GitHub Actions down again today"}, {"id": 768421650, "item_id": 48026353, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48026353", "by": "stryan", "date": "2026-05-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible has a dedicated Quadlet role that works pretty well", "excerpt": "> Having your whole application with its containers, volumes, and networks all defined together in one easy-to-read YAML file is a way better experience. Deployment is two steps: 1. `git clone foo` 2. `docker compose up -d`. You can see the state of the application containers with `docker compose ps`. You can run multiple compose applications on the same host and manage them separately by putting them in different di", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying quadlets", "switched_from": "", "story": "Should I Run Plain Docker Compose in Production in 2026?"}, {"id": 768146145, "item_id": 48009134, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48009134", "by": "coreylane", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I used ansible for years", "excerpt": "I used ansible for years and pyinfra is very approachable since it has similar concepts, like inventories, common operations like files.put, server.shell, loving it so far, and it is quite fast", "context": "", "use_case": "server automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}, {"id": 768142448, "item_id": 48008903, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008903", "by": "appplication", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "I imagine LLMs are probably a little more proficient at ansible just due to volume of training data", "excerpt": "The is cool, thank you for sharing. I was just thinking about onboarding to ansible since I\u2019ve just been following a manual checklist of commands for my remote server but based on positive feedback here I\u2019ll probs oh give this a shot. Only downside is I imagine LLMs are probably a little more proficient at ansible just due to volume of training data.", "context": "", "use_case": "remote server setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}, {"id": 768140993, "item_id": 48008812, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48008812", "by": "ssddanbrown", "date": "2026-05-04", "stance": "compare", "quote": "Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with.", "excerpt": "I've been using PyInfra for a while, albeit just for simple automation (Updating systems, checking certain stats) and I'm a big fan. Compared to Ansible, I found the docs, syntax and usage patterns much easier to get on with. Might just be a preference thing, but I always had trouble going through the Ansible docs. Ran into some bugs, like one machine that seems to cause errors and mess up the output on restart, alth", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "PyInfra 3.8.0 Is Out"}, {"id": 766030145, "item_id": 47876884, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47876884", "by": "ianberdin", "date": "2026-04-23", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "Ansible with some custom Linux tools fits better for Me.", "excerpt": "\u201cEverything is shit. Believe me. We will do something better, just believe me.\u201d Jokes aside: - k8s is insane peace of software. A right tool for a big problem. Not for your toys. Yes, it is crazy difficult to setup and manage. Then what? - cloud has bad and slow disk. BS. They have perfectly fast NVME. Something else? That\u2019s it. Why I am so confident? I used to setup and manage kubernetes for 2 years. I have some exp", "context": "builds own hosting for playcode.io", "use_case": "managing own hosting", "switched_from": "Kubernetes", "story": "I Am Building a Cloud"}, {"id": 765173714, "item_id": 47823357, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47823357", "by": "jillesvangurp", "date": "2026-04-19", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I managed the whole migration via Codex orchestrating my Ansible scripts.", "excerpt": "I migrated from Google Cloud to Hetner beginning of March. I currently have about 9 vms running and I pay a around 130 euro per month. There are very little other fees and generous freemiums for things like networking and storage. I have 3 projects, one LB, a handful of storage buckets, and a private network in one of the projects. That 130 is for everything. Their 40% price increase kicked in shortly after I signed ", "context": "", "use_case": "migration automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Migrating from DigitalOcean to Hetzner: From $1,432 to $233 With Zero Downtime"}, {"id": 765058400, "item_id": 47816150, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47816150", "by": "osmandinc", "date": "2026-04-18", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now", "excerpt": "I\u2019ve been using Ansible for Oracle database patching for a while now, mainly to standardize and simplify the process across environments. Although 19.31 is around the corner and it\u2019s already time to move forward with the usual n-1 approach (19.30), I realized I never shared my updated playbooks for 19.28. The playbooks cover: Grid Infrastructure patching Database RU + MRP RAC environments Out-of-place patching They r", "context": "Oracle DBA", "use_case": "Oracle database patching", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Automated Oracle 19.28 Database and Grid Patching with Ansible"}, {"id": 761342386, "item_id": 47583899, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47583899", "by": "Hackbraten", "date": "2026-03-31", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "If a tool supports scripted credential providers (e.g. aws-cli or Ansible), I use that feature.", "excerpt": "I am now migrating all my unencrypted secrets on my machines to encrypted ones. If a tool supports scripted credential providers (e.g. aws-cli or Ansible), I use that feature. Otherwise, I wrap the executable with a script that runs gpg --decrypt and injects an environment variable. That way, I can at least limit the blast radius when (not if) I catch an infostealer.", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted credential providers", "switched_from": "", "story": "Axios Compromised on NPM \u2013 Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan"}, {"id": 761297793, "item_id": 47581112, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47581112", "by": "h4kunamata", "date": "2026-03-30", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "I use Ansible to automate everything.", "excerpt": ">A lot of our week is made up of the same kinds of small tasks: provision a VM, tweak storage settings, pass through a device, replicate a dataset, share a file, test an image, throw the machine away, do it again. None of that is exciting. All I read is that they are still doing ClickOPS over DevSecOps!! At no moment I heard automation, if you aren't using automation in 2026, your future in IT is cooked. I run Proxmo", "context": "homelab user", "use_case": "automating LXC deployments", "switched_from": "", "story": "From Proxmox to FreeBSD and Sylve in Our Office Lab"}, {"id": 757696690, "item_id": 47356043, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47356043", "by": "LANcaster", "date": "2026-03-12", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "I use monitoring and automation tools like Zabbix, Grafana, Ansible, and Terraform", "excerpt": "Working with Linux for more than 20 years | SysOps and DevOps Expert | Secure and Versatile Infrastructure Design Location: Lisbon, Portugal Remote: Yes, I work remotely since 2005 Willing to relocate: Yes Technologies: Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, Proxmox, Ansible, Terraform, Zabbix, Grafana, Prometheus, PostgreSQL, MySQL, and much, much more LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/krzysztofkotkowicz/ Resume/CV: https:/", "context": "Linux sysadmin/DevOps with 20+ years experience", "use_case": "automation", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2026)"}, {"id": 752472000, "item_id": 47029500, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47029500", "by": "mathstuf", "date": "2026-02-15", "stance": "neutral", "quote": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible.", "excerpt": "We manage Visual Studio on our CI machines using Ansible. Chocolatey installs the full Visual Studio and then we use the APIs provided to manage components via Ansible. See our action here: https://galaxy.ansible.com/ui/repo/published/kitware/visualstudio/", "context": "CI maintainer", "use_case": "managing Visual Studio on CI", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Fixed Windows Native Development"}, {"id": 751097217, "item_id": 46943576, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46943576", "by": "jarofgreen", "date": "2026-02-09", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra.", "excerpt": "Hey, sorry it was hacked. You mention rsync which can be fine. But there are tons of other solutions, many that will have snapshot features. I use borg backup, for instance. https://www.borgbackup.org/ Also, look into scriping your server setup with tools like Ansible or PyInfra. There is always the risk that bad things happen to servers, and when you want a new server it's great to be able to spin things up in a mat", "context": "", "use_case": "scripted server setup", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (February 2026)"}, {"id": 746020592, "item_id": 46626287, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46626287", "by": "theteapot", "date": "2026-01-14", "stance": "warn", "quote": "Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "excerpt": "> I can\u2019t overstate how much I hate GitHub Actions. I don\u2019t even remember hating any other piece of technology I used. Ansible. Same reasons but 100x worse.", "context": "", "use_case": "", "switched_from": "", "story": "I Hate GitHub Actions with Passion"}, {"id": 745564048, "item_id": 46597753, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46597753", "by": "ornornor", "date": "2026-01-12", "stance": "warn", "quote": "I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward", "excerpt": "About ansible: I really like the idea and popularity of ansible but find it so painful to use. YAML sucks, and testing is not straightforward (I use molecule in docker containers with geerlingguy\u2019s sp\u00e9cial images) What\u2019s your workflow for writing tested playbooks?", "context": "", "use_case": "configuration management", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ansible battle tested hardening for Linux, SSH, Nginx, MySQL"}, {"id": 745206464, "item_id": 46575404, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46575404", "by": "al_borland", "date": "2026-01-11", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server.", "excerpt": "I have a silly little internal website I use for bookmarks, searching internal tools, and some little utilities. I keep getting pressure to put it into our heavy and bespoke enterprise CICD process. I\u2019ve seen people quit over trying to onboard into this thing\u2026 more than one. It\u2019s complete overkill for my silly little site. My \u201cdumb\u201d solution is a little Ansible job that just runs a git pull on the server. It gets the", "context": "", "use_case": "deploying internal website", "switched_from": "", "story": "Ask HN: When has a \"dumb\" solution beaten a sophisticated one for you?"}, {"id": 733153776, "item_id": 45822111, "url": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45822111", "by": "jwr", "date": "2025-11-05", "stance": "recommend", "quote": "deployed via ansible to a cluster of physical servers", "excerpt": "This is all correct. I've been running my own servers for many years now, keeping things simple and saving a lot of money and time (setting anything up in AWS or Azure is horribly complicated and the UIs are terrible). One thing to remember is that you do need to treat your servers as \"cloud servers\" in the sense that you should be able to re-generate your entire setup from your configuration at any time, given a bun", "context": "runs own servers for many years, runs a business", "use_case": "server configuration and deployment", "switched_from": "", "story": "I took all my projects off the cloud, saving thousands of dollars"}]}