Anyone used ansible instead of chef?

[AlisonGaiser1]

GIS resides in our IT shop and we are looking standardizing with ansible for our application deployments. Knowing that Esri has created a number of cookbooks for chef we are wondering if anyone has tried to convert them to playbooks? If so, what kind of effort was involved? Is it best just to start from scratch? 

If there are any esri staff out there, do you know if there are any plans to release playbooks or is Esri married to chef?

Thanks!

   Alison 

[JimSomerville1]

We have not, but are considering it.  Have you started down this path?

[AlisonGaiser1]

Jim,

We have started down this path testing with ansible. As we are in a windows environment the developer is finding that the chef tools seem a lot simpler than ansible. Otherwise we are making progress. If you would like I can provide a bit of a review in about a month or so?

Alison 

[JimSomerville1]

That would be great, thanks!

[Carl_Flint]

Alison,

Has your developer made any headway with Ansible?  I too am looking at starting down that path. 

FYI with the windows environment it appears that Chef uses mingw (linux) on its back end.  So realistically a linux virtual machine on windows machine could serve the same purposes as the intermediary to Ansible.  Also Windows 10 has the ability to turn on a hidden Ubuntu sub system (WSL) and can also be used to run Ansible via a bash shell on windows.

[AlisonGaiser1]

We have made some small steps on this front. The first was to use ansible to roll out a patch to ArcGIS Server machines. You are correct in that Chef has been installed on a linux box. There have been some challenges with connecting to the Windows server where the commands are executed. 

The developer is going to be doing a short lunch and learn next week, so I should be able to provide more information at that time. 

Alison 

[MichaelSchoelen]

Has there been any progress on Ansible deployment for ArcGIS Enterprise? I love Chef, but Ansible is becoming more popular--I'd rather not have to set up a new configuration management tool for clients who don't have Chef.

Ansible overtakes Chef and Puppet as the top cloud configuration management tool - TechRepublic 

[JonathanEpstein]

Does anyone have any initial Ansible playbooks which install ArcGIS, to share?

We run ArcGIS in a SELinux (secured RedHat) environment.    Chef is explicitly not supported in SELinux.    We also have considerable in-house Ansible experience, and no in-house Chef experience.

We are glad to participate in this effort, but prefer not to start reinventing wheels which others have already started working on.

[mbishopp]

Does anyone from Esri have something to say about Ansible vs Chef?  We are a solid Ansible shop, so Chef would be an additional "thing" to maintain.  We would rather do all of this in Ansible.

[JonathanEpstein]

I don't work for Esri, but we did wind up writing Ansible playbooks which in turn run the Chef cookbooks.   Overall this combination works well.