Ansible design patterns

[Praveen A]

Hello chaps,

Is there any design pattern present in ansible to have a proper structure and flow like hiera in puppet.

Thanks,

Praveen

[Jeff]

I'm an Ansible newbie (and investigating moving away from Puppet) - so I cant give great Ansible advice.

I think Hiera is well designed - and so far the Ansible model looks simpler to me (that's a good thing!)

I can point you to articles I found helpful:

http://rosstuck.com/multistage-environments-with-ansible/

http://docs.ansible.com/ansible/playbooks_best_practices.html#directory-layout

http://future500.nl/articles/2014/05/how-to-use-ansible-for-vagrant-and-production/

These discuss the hierarchy (ala Hiera), of variable and task determination and give advice on how to organise the manifests.

They were enough to get going for me, in test migrating our 60 odd server setup into Ansible.

Have to say that I prefer the simpler Ansible structure which seems focused on environment/role/purpose over the class directory structure mandated by Puppet.

Just my 2^1 cents.