* John W. Himpel [02/05/2024 17:06] :
But I
prefer using ansible to maintain my server environment. It becomes permanent documentation (in case I am no longer available) and it becomes repeatable by only modifying the "environment files" if a server requires a rebuild.
Over the years, this has become the primary reason I use Ansible. It functions as both code and documentation, making it impossible to change one without changing the other.
I am looking for the opinion and experience of the community in deciding whether or not we should document both types of procedures.
I suspect that our target audience are people who straddle the line between maintaining a handful of servers and having a whole cluster of them. This would suggest that it would be useful to have all three documentation types (GUI, CLI, automated).
Like others, I think writing the configuration and deploying the configuration are two seperate steps. I also think that creating an Ansible playbook is trivial to do once you've actually written the CLI steps and that showing this process is more useful than publishing a playbook.
Emmanuel