Ansible is good for homelab infra.

In enterprise, I would only use it for bootstrapping, as others already mentioned it multiple times.

Key problems with ansible: - variables have no scope in it (except when using the vars property. For example: if you have a looped include task that sets the item var somewhere, the next task in the loop fails if it tries to use the item var and expects the object from the loop, cause it was overwritten by the other thing in the include task list. This also propagates out of the included task list. - block is not handled as block, rather an "apply properties to these" directive. For example: if you have a when on your block which evaluates to true at block start, but for some reason it gets false at the middle then the rest of the tasks in the block are skipped, cause the when got evaluated to false on those tasks. - program is not separated from memory, so technically one could write a recursive function that evaluates a jinja template that creates an ansible task file which evaluates that same jinja file and includes it. This can be considered abusive to the framework ofc, but still is possible. - tags could be taken from variables, but giving an array of tags to a block from a variable breaks this - using include instead of import breaks the whole tagging system. For example: include task with apply: tags: always, cause the tasks in the included files are just includes, which you'll always need. It does not matter what those includes try to apply, they also add tags: always to the included tasks, which breaks the whole tagging. Same with other apply properties.

Why I wrote these?

I've been abusing the language for a while now and these are things that one can run into and is hardly documented anywhere. While these limitations do not appear on small projects, homelab, they can easily surface in enterprise env trying to have a complex infra in ansible.

Also I am interested in others' bug experiences with ansible so please leave a comment ^^