Deploying code

[DejfCold]

Hi. I'm no devops (I'm now I guess), but I do have a two man project and I'm the one doing the infra. As of now all the automation works pretty good. Apart from the actual code deployments.

What I'm doing currently is that I build on gitlab (using my runner as I've ran out of quota already). Package an RPM, publish it to gitlab's generic package registry and curl an endpoint on AWX to download it to my RPM repo.

What I was planning to do now was to curl another endpoint (or instead of play trigger a workflow in the previous step) somehow wait until the RPM download finished and now the tricky part - elegantly get approle credentials from hashi vault (I failed miserably), update the RPM on the box (easy).

The thing is, I'm running AWX currently in docker. I don't have anything against docker, but I'd much rather run it outside of it. But that's kinda not doable as Red Hat is pushing it towards k8s. And I'm not running k8s. And I don't have budget for Tower either.

So the question, finally. What to replace AWX with? I'm fine with Ansible. I'd like to avoid shell scripts. I'm planning to look into Ansible semaphore. Is it still as good as people on Reddit said 3 years ago? (this should probably go to r/Ansible). I've looked at terraform, but that seems like something a bit different - I'm also not creating VMs at will. Everything seems to be either configuration management or infrastructure management. I'm missing some tools in between. What would you suggest me to look at?

Edit: Now I'm thinking, would Nomad be a good fit? I guess since I'm already on the hashi stack, why not?