It definitely is target at a large number of identical servers, but is still very helpful for just a handful of hoses.
Putting everything in YAML is helpful because no matter what service you are setting up, the format is the same to read and understand. And I hope you are using modules and not shell command directly (except for the small cases it is necessary)
Ansible can be as simple or as complex as you made it. I bet your script isn’t as nice as an Ansible setup, nor as maintainable. Ansible’s templating engine is super flexible.
>I bet your script isn’t as nice as an Ansible setup, nor as maintainable. Ansible’s templating engine is super flexible.
Ansible uses jinja2, and so do I. I obviously can't form an objective opinion on the "niceness", having developed it. But I'll say that my setup puts which files are on which hosts front and center, whereas it seems like Ansible would want that splayed out into a directory tree of "roles" (of which I'd have about 25). With my setup, I've got that in 200 lines of python including host/group definitions (excluding comments), with the actual config files living in one analogous tree (eg conf/etc/network/interfaces).
Half the reason I threw my comment out there was to see what bounced back, as I am currently working on this system. One of the responses was about error checking, which resonated. So I've since given Ansible another shot, for managing the top-level (calling my templater for each host, apt upgrade, etc). I think I do like it for this, now that it's much closer to its sweet spot of doing similar things to every host.
Putting everything in YAML is helpful because no matter what service you are setting up, the format is the same to read and understand. And I hope you are using modules and not shell command directly (except for the small cases it is necessary)
Ansible can be as simple or as complex as you made it. I bet your script isn’t as nice as an Ansible setup, nor as maintainable. Ansible’s templating engine is super flexible.