We are not a large shop (around 50 linux servers). I’m new to ansible (and config management). I’ve set up useful processes that stress the “orchestration” side of ansible. I’m working toward building (role) based servers from scratch and am working through the “best” way to handle configuration.
Most of the servers are single server to a single “cluster” of services. As such the configuration is not usually replicated. More importantly, tweaking the configs and deploying the config via ansible seems wrong to me:
- it creates a monolithic entity (orchestrator/deployer/config-manager) which is clumsy
- It requires greater buy in (which negates one of the biggest advantages ansible has for me).
The best fit I’ve found is to have a separate config repository that I can call from the ansible script, but that I can also maintain independently. Is this a normal pattern? Are the other solutions I should consider?
Thanks