What do you prefer for your components - Roles or playbooks ?

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1

Roles are reusable, well managed and promotes sharing - this i understand very well. But somehow, i do not like them much, specially in enterprise applications.

The application i am working on is a monolith being converted in small independent self contained systems. Each deployment is a combination of a set of these components. Each component is managed by a team and these components are functionally dependent on each other, i.e. they can be installed individually, but for the whole system to function, a set of components in required.

I design the deployment automation like this - a playbook for each component asking one input - that deployment specific variables. Teams responsible for components also maintain these component specific scripts and any change will not require mandatory change in another playbook.

Now me and my colleagues have a disagreement in this regard. They are hell bent on using roles, simply because that is the way to go. My arguments are:

  • There is nothing to reuse really. Component specific stuff is not really reusable.
  • Any dependency in within ansible scripts should be avoided.
  • we are not going to put roles in public/private galaxy
  • We need a playbook to use a combination of roles anyway

I want to know what other people using Ansible for deploying their applications think. Do they prefer playbooks for everything or they try to introduce as many roles as possible ?

Also, i was a bit surprised to see that importing a playbook is deprecated now. I was thinking of writing wrapper playbooks that in turn run a bunch of other playbooks in a sequence. I mean what is wrong in that ?

2

I'd use a role per component personally. I'm not 100% clear on why
you'd want to ask for variables
at each run, surely you want to capture that information and remove
the chance of error.

To be honest it's a matter of taste, I'm having to adjust my playbook
styles to match the way
the team works.

By the sound of it your team wants to use roles, I'd weigh that in
your decision much more
heavily than any opinion random dudes on the internet like me are
going to give you.

3

I should have mentioned that my components are going to have multiple installations for different customers, hence the environment specific stuff (target host, ports, names, paths etc) goes inside the var file i provide.

My purpose of posting this here is get idea about others are ‘really’ managing their infrastructure.

4

Playbook includes are not deprecated, the only thing that has been considered was deprecating ‘include’ in favor of include_plays and include_tasks to make it less ambiguous.